Tomas Basham's Blog

Tomas Basham's Blog

A Personal Technology Jekyll Blog and Portfolio

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This is how I use git either working as part of a team or individually. I use an amend/rebase mutable-history workflow where each idea is always represented by one commit. I never make checkpoint commits, and I only need to write git commit messages once per feature (and perhaps amend...

Articles

Last year the team at Netflix posted a tutorial on how to create your own Netflix switch; automating the arduous task of manually turning on your TV, launching the Netflix app and setting the mood with a movie favourite - pizza. However the step-by-step guide left me more confused than...

This article focusses on OS X developers that have installed a series of development tools such as Xcode and Docker and finding they are very quickly burning through storage space. OS X Library folder On OS X the library folder is used by installed applications to store settings and other...

Towards the end of 2015 Google announced that it will start favouring those sites encrypted by SSL. In light of this I have secured my personal website and a few of the sites I have created for a handful of projects. In this article, you will learn how to secure...

In this article, you will learn the importance of structuring Dockerfiles when containerising an application and the pitfalls of doing otherwise. After reading this article, you will have a basic idea of what Docker is, how it can help you, and how it makes application development and deployment more streamlined....

I have used Stack Overflow now for many years and it saves my bacon on a daily basis. I use to regard it as a wondrous place where developers can share ideas and pose questions, however I feel more and more that Stack Overflow has mutated into a monstrous Q&A...

I have been working on a fairly large Ruby on Rails application for about a year now and have noticed a decline in the readability of the code base as the application has become more complex and exacerbated, with small hacks to attempt to solve problems. After all, this is...

WebSockets are a technology that creates a persistent connection between a web browser and a web server allowing two way communication between the two to occur at any time. The types of application this technology is best suited are that of real time software applications offering instant updates and that...

PHP Data Objects (PDO) is a database access layer providing a more secure and uniform interface for accessing and altering data within databases. Where most programmers learn to connect to MySQL databases with the MySQL or MySQLi extensions that can be prone to several security pitfalls, such as SQL injection,...