Blog posts

Sometimes I need to test if a particular machine is able to send e-mail via an SMTP server. Using telnet or openssl is a great way to test and debug connection issues.

While working on an API project, I realised that I actually didn’t know how to receive JSON data in the request body with PHP. Turns out it’s really simple with the php://input stream.

I love the Oh My ZSH framework for Z Shell and I use it on almost every machine today. However in some Vagrant boxes I sometimes run into trouble with the Git prompt.

We ran into some character encoding issues with our automated tests on Travis recently. Luckily, it’s very easy to change the MySQL configuration in your test environment.

I often see cron jobs configured to pipe all output to /dev/null to get rid of it. Other times the emails cron sent are piling up and ignored due to alert fatigue.