While working on another article, I finally hit the point where I really REALLY wanted to put smaller images in the overall article view, but to be able to click on the image and have the image show up full-sized. Such is the pain-point of including screenshots in an article. So, I did some checking, and found the Colorbox plugin.

I have been a PHP programmer for years, having used it without frameworks, to frameworks like Zend Framework (now rebranded as Laminas) and Laravel, to custom in-house frameworks. At the same time, I went from using it with JavaScript in its various versions, to using the jQuery library with jQuery UI and various add-ons like DataTables.

In setting up my CI/CD pipeline for some demo Docker containers recently, I ran into a frustrating, yet puzzling issue while trying to get Docker Swarm working. Indeed, it left me like "Johnny" Number 5 from the movie Short Circuit with questions, queries, and posers.

I have recently been creating some automatic jobs for doing database replication, and I started reflecting upon the differences between doing them using a cronjob vs. using a scheduled Jenkins job. I figured I might share my thoughts on the topic.

I have been writing a ton of unit tests of late, and I am constantly asking myself the question "What are good unit tests?" There are probably as many nuanced versions of this as their are developers, but when you boil it down, it comes down to the following:

Rather than a standard blog entry, which mostly remains unchanged after creation, this is going to be a living document of MongoDB tricks which may be useful to other developers because they are useful to me. These are all utilized within the mongosh utility.

Basic commands

Here are some basic commands which show the databases, the collections and do basic queries.

Another part of my working on moving Medusa v2 to Medusa v4 is, after reading this excellent article, to see about adding schema validation to our MongoDB collections.

Yesterday, I wrote about legacy code and how it really was not possible to initially do test driven development, aka TDD. In this post, I will detail a strategy which I feel is good at explaining how to go about testing. I make no guarantees that this is the best way to go about it (please feel free to suggest other tricks you might use), but it works. But these are useful for me in porting Medusa V2 code to Medusa V4 (long story about why not V3, but there are reasons).

I am sure many of us have faced the task of trying to do test driven development (TDD) on a legacy codebase. I myself am facing such a challenge, with several tens of thousands of lines of code in a Laravel project which I am helping maintain and is around a decade old. And being severely behind in the packages it uses, the time has come to give the code some TLC, and update it to use the most recent versions of those package (for example, we are moving from Laravel 5 to 12).