whateverthing.com

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When I'm in an experimental mood, or working on a proof of concept, I like to code in a scrappy way. Anonymous functions allow me to avoid pausing my train of thought to think of a name for something. However, when I'm using the Symfony Console Component to write command-line utilities, it seems that I have to write a class for each command.

No more, I say!

I've created a tiny library called beryllium/llama that lets me set the configuration and execution logic of console commands using anonymous functions, right in the constructor. When I found myself using the technique across several projects, I did what anyone would do - I gave it a silly name and threw it on GitHub and Packagist.

Sculpin is a PHP-based static website generator, ideal for powering websites that don't need dynamic DB-driven features or web-based administration. It's commonly used for blogging, but can be used for pretty much any marketing site you need, such as corporate websites, online portfolios, or even emergency downtime pages for when your WordPress site has been hacked ... (Kidding! Proper maintenance and security practices will make WordPress downtime a rarity.)

When running a website, you'll often want to reuse snippets of HTML. Many editors and IDEs have this functionality built in, but the problem with using editor snippets is maintainability. If you want to alter the snippet, you have to suss out every place it was used and manually edit it.

Sculpin uses the Twig templating engine, which has a feature that solves this problem. Twig macros are kind of like functions, like you would find in PHP or Javascript. They can be a bit tricky to get started with, so check out the tips below for help.

CascadiaJS 2015 was an amazing three-day Javascript and CSS conference hosted at Semiahmoo Resort in Blaine, Washington. It was also the first technology conference I've attended since 2011's Symfony Live in San Francisco.

"[Case] also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn't there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself. "
— William Gibson (Neuromancer)

Last month, I shut down the Gibson Index project. I hope one day to resurrect it in a new form and with renewed purpose, but this first version of it did not garner the traction necessary to keep me engaged.

Manually compiling data on increasingly commonplace cyber attacks was a lot of work, and tacking on an arbitrary rating to each one provided little to no overall value. Instead, I am hoping to free up time for my litany of other projects, including one that automatically compiles data on restaurant inspections (and tacks on an arbitrary rating - but using an algorithm, instead).

Thanks for reading. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.