Freelancing Q&A sessions
Over the past few years, I've delivered Q&A sessions on what it is like to be a freelancer, at conferences and to groups of students at universities. These have always…
Security support for PHP 7 ends in November 2022
If you have an application or hosting solution which was set up several years ago, there’s a reasonable chance that you are still running PHP 7. Security support for 7.4,…
Disabling HTML form validation
If you've built a HTML form at any point in the last few years, you're probably aware that there is limited validation built-in to modern browsers. For example, you can…
Convert UK date to ISO date in JavaScript
One of the applications I work on captures dates in UK format (dd/mm/yyyy) but needs to convert them into ISO format (yyyy-mm-dd) when making AJAX calls to APIs. Rather than…
Automated WordPress updates for Sympl
Back in 2020, I migrated my personal and business servers to Sympl. Several sites ran WordPress, and I wanted to automate the application of updates to WordPress itself, as well…
Sorting arrays in Twig
Several projects I work on use the Twig templating system to separate the look of a site from the backend logic. One change I was asked for recently was to…
Changing Docker container timezones
By default, most Docker containers seem to use UTC as the timezone. This is generally sensible for servers, however some of the web applications I maintain assume that the system…
Force SSH to prompt for password
I've long used public/private keys as my default way of authenticating via SSH, for the following reasons: I don't need to share my credentials with whoever creates the account.I can…
Exclude files from searches in Visual Studio Code
For several years now I've been using Visual Studio Code as my main editor, and one bugbear of mine was that by default a search in a project would find…
Docker helper scripts
I recently took on some new clients who were already using Docker, and I found it so useful that I now use it in nearly every project. As with any…