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It's no secret that I'm a fan of the Twig templating system. I like the syntax and flexibility far more than Smarty, PHP Templates, and other solutions I've worked with. I also like that it has minimal outside dependencies, so I can quickly add it to any project.

One of Twig's more interesting features is that it converts template files to PHP classes. This can really save processing power, because it only has to happen once and future references to that template can just invoke the saved PHP class.

However, if you forget to enable Twig caching, the compiled PHP classes are discarded after each page load - this burns a ton of resources and slows down your site.

Enabling Twig caching only requires a few magical incantations, and as luck would have it, I'm happy to demonstrate two common scenarios.

It started with a simple question:

Ever come across a suspicious short URL and wanted to know where it really goes?

I'd just encountered one too many bit.ly links, and decided that I wanted to know where it went before I clicked on it. It's a simple exercise to find out (you can probably do it in one line in Linux, for example), but I thought I'd use it as a way to learn something new.

AngularJS is a framework for single page web applications, and I've been wanting to learn a bit more front-end technology for a little while. Anything to give my javascript knowledge a boost would be helpful, too.

Square is often considered the go-to solution for mobile payment systems, but it has two shortcomings that could limit its uptake in Canada. Debit (via Interac) and Chip-and-PIN technologies are very popular here, and Square supports neither. As a result, there’s more of a competition opportunity here than there might be in the US.

Two competitors - Moneris and Chase - are big names in payment processing, and they are trying to get in on the mobile payments action in a big way. Intuit, a third competitor, is a very big name in accounting, and also wants a stake in the mobile payments arena.

If you’re considering getting a mobile payment device for your sales efforts, whether you run a street vendor booth or a full retail location, you should explore the pros and cons of each choice.

Lately I’ve been feeling a bit burnt out about technology and even the world in general. This summer has been a bit of a pounding in a few ways, at least if you follow the news. And I do follow the news - entirely too much. The world seems to be trending to a dark place.

Again.

But on the bright side, there’s one place that has always been dark and foreboding. No matter how bad the world gets, this one place can’t get any worse than it already is.

I speak, of course, of forgotten code. Not dead code, not mere legacy code, but rather, code that runs every day yet hasn’t been looked at by a developer in years. Often, the code was written in a hurry using the fastest time-to-implement solution available. Sometimes by a very inexperienced developer.

All of that means one thing: it could be vulnerable.