These are linux commands that I use every day at work and home as a web developer.

History is useful, especially when dealing with deployments and other setups on projects that you are not very familiar with. If the standard go-to guy for deploying the app is on vacation, and you need to deploy emergency fix - history is your friend. 

I normally use sudo su - www-data and change directory to the web app i'm dealing with. As deployments in terms of a php app is normally done via the www-data user / web server user.

If the project is a php project you can assume that it uses composer (at least now in 2019). Then, to find out how the app was deployed you can simply use history together with grep.

Using this command you should probably get some results of how to use the composer install command. 

"pwd" shows the current working directory. Useful when you're lost.

"top" is useful to check for abnormal resource usage. A list of the processes will display live in the terminal. Important statistics are e.g. memory usage and CPU usage.

To sort the results by memory usage press "SHIFT+M".

"clear" clears the terminal in the viewport. Very useful when you need a clean sheets for some heavy command use. I normally use clear 

I use grep every day for searching a tree of files for some keyword. 

To do a recursive lookup you can use the following command:

This command searches the src/ folder and its sub folders of a file that contains the word "cash" or even "CaSH". 

l: Means it prints only the names of the files that matches.

And then to some one-off commands for dealing with web related tech.

This is especially useful when testing caching strategies and deployment. You want to remove all the data in memcache.

This command uses netcat, connects to the memcache instance and runs the "flush_all" command which clears the memcache data.

Useful linux commands that I use every day as a web developer.

Useful linux commands for web developers

Today we will take a look at how we can implement simple global state using useContext and useReducer hooks. 

We don't need redux to implement global state. That said, redux has some nice features that we wont have using the method i am about to show.

 is supposed to be called once, and preferably on the top component. 

 is a hook that we can use anywhere on all of our components. 

This is the magic of hooks! Here we have created two functions

A HoC: withGlobalContext
Which we will use on the App component.

A hook: useGlobalState
Which is just a wrapper around useContext.

Lets create an App component and also 3 components that uses global state.

We will be using these actions through the test components we will create.

The counter component uses our custom hook "useGlobalState". This hook returns the globalState object and a dispatch method so that we can send actions to change the global state.

MyNameComponent also uses global state. This component has the ability to update the name and clear the name of the global state.

AsyncComponent uses the global state. It fetches some values from a API then dispatches actions.

How to do global state without any library, just using react hooks!

Global state with standard react hooks

PHP is probably amongst the most hated programming languages around the world. Some people love it, some people say its a toy language, some people hate it with a passion.

PHP has grown a lot within the last couple of years. PHP now supports proper OOP, and have concepts like Classes, Interfaces, Traits, Closures / lamdas,  Generators, Strict types, and more.

This article will be a list of what I think is good, and what I dont like about PHP.

PHP is really easy to get started with. Put a script on a web server and run it. This can also be bad.

You dont have to learn basic concepts like how the http protocol works, just create a script and start echoing stuff out. This can also be bad.

PHP 7+ is really fast, it beats the contenders such as 

PHP has composer which can be compared to gem, pip and npm. Composer was probably the best thing that happened with PHP.

PHP has plenty of well tested blogging systems and cms systems. E.g. Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and eZ Publish. This alone is huge, and might be a big reason that PHP is still alive.

PHP has great libraries for doing advanced integrations and large legacy systems.

Creating complex libraries is great because PHP supports almost full type safety in classes.

Well tested frameworks used in production for years: Symfony and Laravel.

PHP Documentation is readable and indexed greatly by google. Just google that function and you are good.

PSR. PHP Standards Recommendation. This project is great, it means that libraries written can work with each other. Also PSR consist of a coding standards guide, which leads to better code.

PHP's mess around global functions can be frustrating.

Dollar sign in front of variables shouldn't be necessary. I would rather use literals to concatenate.

Because PHP is so simple by default, it doesn't have good defaults for security such as XSS injections.

I mean it. Its way too easy. PHP is so easy to learn, which leads to really bad code written by junior developers which just started learning to code. 

I dont like Java. Actually I dont like Java at all. PHP is starting to feel more like Java. This can be great, but often leads to overly complex code. E.g. use a simple array instead of creating 10 value object classes that implements each of its own interface?

When working with PHP projects you would often work with legacy code. This legacy code was e.g. written by really bad programmers or was written for PHP 4 with no OOP at all. Working with such code makes you feel like a sad -sad Panda. Often these systems are also full of bugs.

Legacy code can be true for other programming languages as well. But I solely think PHP has the worst legacy code. PHP 4 was really bad and the eco system was not there.

PHP, the good and the bad

. Typed properties would be really good for PHP, as PHP has already gone on the way to be a strict types language. 

The RFC has been accepted, and PHP 7.4 will now include typed properties.

The benefits of the new typed properties:

Relying on dockblocks for code completion in IDE's.

Future performance improvements can be done internally in PHP.

Less type checking code, meaning cleaner code.

This is an example of how you can define typed properties, in reference to the RFC:

First of, the obvious. There are no longer needs for types in dockblocks and getters / setters to ensure type safety. This alone is a huge deal. Today, per property there are at least 21 lines of code that can be removed. This given the PSR coding standards.

Which can be converted to 3 lines of code.

Sometimes you would need a getter / setter in cases where the contents of the variable mutates to something else. Still the dockblock would not be needed.

Useful linux commands for web developers

Global state with standard react hooks

PHP, the good and the bad

PHP 7.4, typed properties RFC

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