Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog
-
First steps: A Symfony 4 PHP app in Docker
I’m currently learning Docker, and finding out how to develop a (new) Symfony 4 (PHP 7) application locally on my Mac and run it within a Docker container, instead of hosting it in a Linux VM in VMware Fusion as I used to do. Docker Desktop and the PhpStorm IDE are already installed. Docker setup…
-
Tweets 2019-03
2019-03-30: That feeling when your vendor sends a beta and you can finally play with the new feature you’ve been waiting for for a year. 2019-03-28: This: “Our DAM systems sit at the edge of the wheel, while our Scripps Asset Registry sits in the middle and manages the relationships between these systems. […] Our…
-
The story of my favorite bug
In the fifteenth year of my software developer career, I encountered a remarkable bug that would “entertain” me for weeks. “Garbage in, garbage out”? It started off rather innocuously: At a recently-installed customer site, I noticed that a few XML files sent from the editorial system weren’t imported correctly into our DAM system. The files…
-
Using XML to copy data from PostgreSQL to MySQL
Today, I needed to copy a few tables from a PostgreSQL database into a MySQL database. I wanted to use XML files to exchange the data so I could inspect and validate it easily. I expected this to be a lot of work (including XSLT magic), but it was surprisingly easy: It turns out that…
-
Clean Data is more important than Clean Code
In my experience, many software developers don’t care much about data modeling. They seem to prioritize clean code, a good technology stack and a good user interface over getting the data model right. All of these are important, but the data model is the foundation: You can refactor source code anytime, going from unclean to…
-
Playing with the Camunda workflow engine (and PHP)
A generic workflow engine, configured via a graphical diagram editor on top of an XML syntax – that’s what I tried and failed to develop more than 15 years ago. I did help build three generations of a simple “workflow” component integrated in our DAM product to drive asset ingestion and export, kept reading (see…
-
What to put on a DAM Admin dashboard
Imagine you introduce a shiny new Digital Asset Management (DAM) system in your company which can feed all kinds of metrics into the brightly-colored Grafana dashboard hanging on your wall. What would you track on that dashboard to help you manage, grow and troubleshoot your DAM system? Off of the top of my head, these…
-
The “X” in JSON stands for Extensibility
While I do use JSON, I still think XML is superior for some important use cases (long-lived data that may be exchanged with other systems). So here’s a quick “rant” – prompted by Dan Brickley’s response to Bob DuCharme’s Reification is a red herring – aimed at those (younger?) folks “dissing” XML 🙂 Over time,…
-
Digital Asset Management Reading List Feb./Mar. 2018
This time, I cover two months at once: Here’s the Digital Asset Management (DAM) articles from February and March 2018 which I recommend reading. I picked them from the constant stream of blog posts you can see float by on Planet DAM. For more curated DAM links, see the weekly Digital Asset Management.com Links and…
-
For better software, keep talking
In my experience, things diverge quickly in software development when people stop talking to each other. It’s costly if we notice too late that priorities or needs have changed, schedules slipped, or features evolved in the wrong direction. Developers, users, managers (product, project, or people managers): Keep talking – all of the time – to…