Technologies

I do write a lot of front-end code, despite being born to be a back-end guy. Long story short - we do have many inline editing features, especially elements like dates, which are pretty painful. HTML5 Introduced input type=date , which is good enough to cover most of the cases, and we no longer need ugly and slow .datepicker() component from jQuery od 3rd party suppliers.

So if you do have edit you can use <input type="date" value="yyyy-mm-dd"> field, and a nice calendar will pop up. But we are looking for inline solution.

As each programmer by nature, I’m lazy. I try to accomplish as much as possible with minimum effort.

So whenever I use PHP to fetch something, I use file_get_contents to make queries and pull data from other services. So basically, my favourite snippet is this guy here:

I recently moved my blog from WordPress to Hugo , which involved a lot of content fixing. One of the problems was that not all HTML code was correctly transferred to markup during the export. So I needed fix (replace) all pending <a href="https://spidersoft.com.au">spidersoft</a> to [spidersoft](https://spidersoft.com.au).

What we need are just two simple regular expressions.

One to find links <a.*?href="(.+?)".*?>(.+?)</a>

Second one to replace them in reverse order [$2]($1)

You can run this in basically any IDE - Sublime will do the job, I was using PHPStorm

I’ve been avoiding Docker for a very long time. I started as a sysadmin setting up servers running FreeBSD and early versions of Debian on bare-bone servers. As soon as “cloud” came into the market, I switched to AWS and GCE and have used them since then. EC2 was my always goto choice to deploy something on the internet quickly. But Docker — for some reason, I was avoiding it until this two years ago, when I started using it. Without too much trust.

But today, history is not about my love & hate relationship with Docker, but about deploying the GO application and VIPS library. A couple of problems appeared during the process, and it’s worth mentioning them for future generations because I could find much help around my issues.

Recently one of my clients contacted me asking if I could make a change. The task was to shrink huge margins on PDF delivery slips. The mission wasn’t easy because the settings were hidden in the files. You can change font size and amend or remove elements from the printout by modifying templates. Unfortunately, you can’t decrease the margin on PDF printouts.