Category: Notes (Page 1 of 45)

Notes on programming-related problems that I’ve encountered while working on various projects.

Don’t Over-Architect Your Blog Posts

June 10, 2021 / Tom

At some point, I lost the motivation to write about anything that would include too much code because of the amount of time it would take to:

put a functioning solution together,
architect it in such a way that’d fit with best practices (at least for OOP),
explain the various features about OOP that the reader may not know,
then explain the problem.

This is too complex.

I’m not saying that articles shouldn’t be written that explain the concepts of object-oriented programming or shouldn’t talk about certain rationale for why something was done.

Writing PHP Command-Line Applications: Command-Line Arguments

January 26, 2021 / Tom

TL;DR: $argv is an array of arguments passed to the script with the first index being the name of the script itself. And $argc is the number of arguments passed to the the script (which will always at least be 1).

Arguably, pun intended, one of the key pieces of command-line application is making sure that they are interactive through command-line arguments. In PHP, there are two variables to understand:

$argc is the number of arguments passed to script. Note the script’s filename is always passed as an argument to the script, therefore the minimum value of $argc is 1.
$argv is an array of arguments passed to script. Note the first argument $argv[0] is always the name that was used to run the script.

Writing PHP Command-Line Applications: A Basic Script

January 22, 2021 / Tom

TL;DR: I’ve been writing PHP command-line scripts to help automate mundane tasks. As these tasks are growing in complexity or turning more into applications that interface with third-party APIs, I’m documenting the things I find important that others may also find helpful.

There are three things necessary to get a basic script up and running on your local machine (assuming you already have PHP installed):

Know the path to the PHP binary,
Make sure your script references said binary,
And make the script executable.

Happy Thanksgiving

November 26, 2020 / Tom

I never know how many people are reading articles like this the day they are published, but I’ve always been a fan of sharing a note of Thanksgiving Day (at least that’s what it is here in the USA).

Quick Tip: Get the Size of a MySQL Database

November 9, 2020 / Tom

TL;DR: In this quick tip, I provide a simple query for determine the size of a database (that includes all tables). This is useful when determine what the largest tables are, especially if there are custom tables in your WordPress installation, and how large they actually are.