whateverthing.com

☰

I'm a contributor to the Sculpin open source project. Sculpin is a PHP-based static site generator that helps you create blogs or informational websites. Posts and pages can be written in Markdown or HTML, and it uses the Twig template library to provide enhanced functionality. The best part is, the resulting output is static - it can be hosted on any HTTP server, including AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), without having to worry about maintaining databases or other headaches.

When users create sites in Sculpin, they often use it in --watch mode. In this mode, Sculpin runs as a simple PHP server that watches the filesystem for any changes to your blog posts, pages, and templates. When it detects a change, it regenerates the affected HTML files. It's not speedy enough in this mode to serve the site to the Internet - plus, it only has a single process - but it's great for development and local testing.

Earlier this week, a bug was reported on Sculpin's develop branch, where the watch process wasn't properly applying changes to inherited templates. I had to go to some creative lengths to solve it, and while I'm not entirely certain that my proposed solution is the proper one, it contains at least one thing worth blogging about.

Silex is dead.

I am sad.

But I can see the future, and it is bright.

Several years ago, I deleted my profile on LinkedIn. I felt that the platform was drifting away from its original usefulness, and I was curious what the experience of deleting a social media account would be like.

It's been amazing!

But there were also drawbacks. And these drawbacks eventually led me to investigate Facebook and Twitter's processes, as well.

It's a question that people often want to know the answer to, but don't often have the time to ask: How do you keep programming fun?

When it's your job, day in and day out, to apply these concepts in rigid ways to achieve business goals ... that can sometimes suck the fun out of things. So how can you avoid that?

I have a lot of tactics for avoiding that sort of burnout (including a pantheon of half-finished hobby programming projects, and many non-programming interests), but I think that the easiest one is simply playing with code.

Find little problems that you can solve with code in a short amount of time.