Last week I was invited into a discussion by our development team. Having been a developer as well as a system architect they wanted me to share an opinion about the perfect fit branching model. Judging by the number of diagrams drawn my colleagues had been at it for quite some time.

I’m not sure if the opinion I shared was what they expected though.

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Git · Subversion

A colleague of mine asked me to teach him web development. He’s a digital native and he worked on the management side of internet projects for a few years, he understands the business but he has no clue about programming and such.

I thought lets teach him some basics.

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Git · Heroku · PHP · Silex

More or less by accident I discovered that Facebook now teams up Heroku a San Francisco based hoster to provide easy hosting environments to Facebook App developers.

So I thought lets try it out and while I’m at it make it run Silex and Twig!

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Cloud Hosting · Deployment · Facebook App · Git · Heroku · Silex · Twig

I greatly enjoy working with Open Source Software and I enjoy it even more if it’s hosted on GitHub as sometimes things are missing for you and you can simply add them and do a pull request to the maintainers.

This is my simple workflow to do this.

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Git · GitHub · Open Source

I don’t know who is responsible for having the first session start at 9h30 on a Saturday and after a GitHub night out but I’m happy not to have to take that slot.

Today is the last day of PHPDay in Italy. Yesterday was great fun and today will be just as good I reckon.

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Git · Legacy Code · PHP · phpday · testing · Unit Tests

After a week of holidays and only a few minutes of being online or even in front of a computer I am back to the real work of work and blog.

To be honest I had little idea of what to write today. Fortunately I received an email from Benjamin (a.k.a. robo47)  about my sfImageTransformExtraPlugin. He asked if there is any chance to retrieve the stable releases from GitHub as well as from the symfony website.

And he’s got a point. Many developers have switched to git by now while symfony (1.x) only provides subversion. So here are a few best practices for those symfony plugin developers who have switched their development to GitHub (like me). (more…)

best practice · Git · GitHub · Plugin · plugins · Subversion · symfony

Using .gitmodules you can easily embed external libraries into your own code no matter if it’s a library or a maybe a symfony plugin.

But if this external library includes some unit test classes as well an autoloader might get confused. This happened to me at least and so far I don’t know a good answer to it. Do you?

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best practice · Git · Subversion

I must admit that I have been lazy with my efforts on continuous integration lately. Eventually my server crashed unnoticed and I didn’t get any emails about broken builds anymore and by now I think I’ve stacked up some work to do.

First of course I’ve got to get my CI server up and running again, that’s why I installed Hudson again.

But there is room for improvement too. Sebastian Bergmann of PHPUnit fame spent some time on a template Hudson job for PHP projects that includes much more than PHPUnit. So I decided to use that!

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Continuous Integration · Git · GitHub · Hudson · PHP · phpUnit · plugins · sfImageTransformExtraPlugin · Subversion · symfony

Lately I was playing around with my old Hudson installation to try and use Sebastian Bergmanns PHP Hudson template. But in the end I only had it halfway working and was increasingly confused by the number of plugins I had installed.

So I decided to make a backup of everything and start from scratch with a fresh install. Only there are no official ebuild for my Gentoo box..

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Continuous Integration · Gentoo · Git · GitHub · Hudson · Sebastian Bergmann

If you are still working with version control systems like CVS or Subversion then you are probably working in a team. And you probably learned all about commit conflicts for files where you and a colleague work on but from different angles.

You’re life could be so much easier when using Git!

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Collaboration · Git · GitHub