Just a quick note to announce that I’ve made source and build scripts for both versions of No Frills Magento Layout available in a public GitHub repo. I’m not open-sourcing the books or publishing them under a creative commons license, but they’re both available to read for free for the first time. ...

The US social safety net is a weird collection of laws and policies. We don’t have a national system of last resort where residents can receive payments to support themselves while they’re out of work. We used to have that, it was called welfare, and the federal government outsourced that to the ind...

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Containers, Containers, Containers. Earlier posts include What is a Container and why Docker Makes that a Difficult Question to Answer, Running Go Programs in Docker Scratch Containers, and Five Reasons Your PHP Application is Hard to Containerize for Producti...

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Containers, Containers, Containers. Earlier posts include What is a Container and why Docker Makes that a Difficult Question to Answer, and Running Go Programs in Docker Scratch Containers. Later posts include Accessing Docker Desktop's Virtual Machine. First ...

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Containers, Containers, Containers. Earlier posts include What is a Container and why Docker Makes that a Difficult Question to Answer. Later posts include Five Reasons Your PHP Application is Hard to Containerize for Production, and Accessing Docker Desktop's...

Mastodon is a decentralized, federated social network technology. With Twitter recently realizing its investor’s goals via an — unorthodox — sale to a wealthy entrepreneur and industrial scion with hard-right-leaning values, many people have wondered whether the platform will remain a useful or habi...

In recent years there’s this image that will make the rounds with a ranking of programming languages by energy efficiency. If you haven’t seen it, it looks like this. I want to be careful here because I’m not a researcher. I don’t design studies and I don’t know how to design studies or anything abo...

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Containers, Containers, Containers. Later posts include Running Go Programs in Docker Scratch Containers, Five Reasons Your PHP Application is Hard to Containerize for Production, and Accessing Docker Desktop's Virtual Machine. I’ve been using containers in de...

I recently pulled myself out of Magento retirement to give Commerce Bug a few minor adjustments that should make it Magento 2.4.4 and PHP 8.1 compatible. If you’re still seeing problems get in touch and we’ll get you sorted out. The extension ran into a few issues with PHP 8.1’s new levels of strict...

One of my background projects this year is reducing the paid services that my software company, Pulse Storm, makes use of. These aren’t gigantic costs, but sales of Commerce Bug and No Frills Magento Layout have steadily declined as Adobe has methodically retired the Magento brand and the Open Sourc...