Podcast Roundup: May 2015 Edition

I've been trying to figure out how to communicate Podcasts and links that I found to be informational or interesting but I don't want to clutter up my site with junk so I'm going to start creating roundups every month so I can still communicate these but not have 100 one link posts.

FLOSS

#335 Taiga.io

This sounds like a really interesting Agile project management system. I've created an account and it looks amazing.

This Week In Startups

Episode: 543: LAUNCH Incubator 2: Des Traynor, Cofounder Intercom, on product vision, roadmap, virality, & everything you need to know for "Starting Up"

This is a really interesting presentation about a bunch of topics that are important if you're creating a project. I've listened to it twice and I'll keep coming back to it. I might even listen to it again and post my notes. It was packed with information.

Sound of Symfony

Episode 7 - Talking about tools

An overview of various tools use in PHP development. I'm always looking for better tools to improve my work.

Episode 8 - Concerning command buses

An interesting overview of command buses.

HANSELMINUTES PODCAST

Accessibility (a11y) with OpenDirective's Steve Lee

TIL a11y = Accessibility because it starts with an "a", ends with a "y", and has 11 characters in between.

Accessibility is one of those things that I think I should do more with but never do. I'm really going to make it a goal to get my stuff together and test my sites for accessibility.

Saving Bletchley Park with Dr. Sue Black

Bletchley Park is where Turing helped create the computer that broke the Enigma. This interview talks to one of the people who was involved in converting it to a mueseum and clears up some inaccuracies in The Imitation Game (a great movie if you haven't seen it yet)

Diversity Hiring

We just finished hiring a new programmer at Zimco and almost all of the candidates we got were white men (a lot of that is due to our office's location in Mid-Michigan). It was interesting to hear two separate podcasts that discussed diversity hiring within as many days.

1. Stack Exchange Podcast #64: Diverse Hiring and a Cat Named Alan Turing
2. Improving Diversity in Tech with Ashe Dryden & Faruk Ateş

Debugging Facebook Posts

When your users share something on Facebook they get something that looks like this:

One of my clients had a problem where the text that was showing when sharing a page to Facebook was wrong and I learned two things.

1. It's very hard to test this using the normal front end.
2. Facebook caches information about your page.

The link below give you access to see what Facebook is getting from your site so you can fix any issues and force an update to clear the cache.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/

The thing I find most interesting is that Facebook is finding this winking smiley face on the TPT home page:

Better Know a Library: Faker

When you're developing websites it's very easy to create a small subset of data so you can test but there are some performance issues and bugs that will only rear their ugly head when you have a large amount of data. It's very difficult to create this test data and have unique values set. You could just fill your database with random letters and numbers (substr(sha1(gmdate('U'))), 0, 10) but it's better to have nice looking data if you need to demo changes.

The Faker library provides a way to generate fake but real looking data for your test environment.

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Video: How to Learn to Code

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvK0UzFNw1Q[/embed]

Creating Your Own Standard in PHPCS

At Zimco, we've started working on standardizing our coding but we ran into a little problem while we tried to automate the process of making sure our code adhered to that standard.

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Link Post: Unmasked: What 10 million passwords reveal about the people who choose them

I have a love/hate relationship with passwords and it's interesting to see what the common passwords are.

http://wpengine.com/unmasked/

Link Post: Introducing the Symfony Demo application

I've been working with Symfony for a couple projects and I've been super happy with the documentation. It seems like every time I do a search for something that I'm stuck on the project has already had a piece of documentation. It's nice to see they have this cool demo application that's using their best practices. It's super basic but it's a nice reference.

http://symfony.com/blog/introducing-the-symfony-demo-application

Creating a Custom Fork of a Composer Library

Composer is great because you can easily add libraries to your projects and have it automatically pull down the same versions for every deploy of your site. The downside to composer libraries (and open source in general), is that sometimes it's hard to get your pull requests for bug fixes merged into the master so you can use it on your project or add your own customizations. You can fork the repository in order to gain more control over the source.

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GitHub QuickTip: Adding a Folder From the Web Interface

I needed to add a file to a directory that didn't exist using the GitHub web interface (I didn't want to clone the repo [lazy I know]). If you add a new file and then type the name of the directory and then the forward slash (/) it will automatically create the folder:

Cool trick for the two times a year I need to make changes directly on the GitHub site. ;-)

Helpful Tool: Initializr

Initializr is here to kick-start the development of your new projects. It generates templates based on HTML5 Boilerplate by allowing you to choose which parts you want or don't want from it. A responsive template has also been added to start from a basic design instead of a blank page.

This was super helpful when I created a new site for a client.

http://www.initializr.com/