Notes on Building Software That Lasts

WordPress Feb 25, 2025

The “Allow Pingbacks and Trackbacks” setting in WordPress controls whether your site accepts and sends pingbacks and trackbacks. These are ways for your blog to communicate with other blogs and notify them when you link to their content (and vice versa). Let’s break down what they are and why you might (or might not) want […]

Databases Feb 25, 2025

Have you ever encountered this warning message while working with MariaDB on Linux? Warning: The unit file, source configuration file or drop-ins of mariadb.service changed on disk. Run 'systemctl daemon-reload' to reload units. If so, don’t worry! It’s a common occurrence, and this blog post will explain what it means and how to quickly resolve […]

Databases Feb 22, 2025

Databases are the backbone of modern applications, helping businesses store, organize, and retrieve data efficiently. But with so many types of databases available, it can be tricky to decide which one fits your needs best. In this blog, we’ll break down three popular database models, Document, Relational, and Graph, explaining their differences, use cases, and […]

Databases Sep 18, 2024

Short answer: MySQL error #1442 means a trigger or stored function tried to run its own UPDATE, INSERT or DELETE on the same table as the statement that called it. MySQL forbids that. To change the row being written, use SET NEW.column = value in a BEFORE trigger instead. For anything else, write to a […]

Frontend Engineering Aug 08, 2024

Short answer: tree shaking is the step where a bundler such as webpack, Rollup or esbuild removes code your app imports but never uses. It only works on ES modules, because import and export can be analyzed without running the code. Mark files with side effects in package.json so the bundler does not drop code […]

Git & Version Control May 25, 2024

Short answer: your local branch and the remote branch both have commits the other does not, and Git will not guess how to combine them. Pick one and set it once: git config pull.rebase false to merge, git config pull.rebase true to rebase, or git config pull.ff only to allow only fast-forwards. Add --global to […]

Git & Version Control May 12, 2024

Short answer: Merge made by the 'ort' strategy. is not an error. Git printed it because your git pull or git merge created a merge commit, and ort is the engine it used to build that commit. Ort has been Git’s default merge strategy since Git 2.34. Nothing needs fixing. Introduction Git keeps improving how […]

Expert Opinion May 11, 2024

Related reading PHP 8 named arguments Related: These small PHP 8 features add up when you are modernizing an older codebase. See Modernizing legacy PHP without a rewrite.

Expert Opinion Mar 28, 2024

PHP 8 introduced named parameters, which allow you to pass arguments to a function by specifying the parameter name followed by the corresponding value, instead of relying solely on the order of parameters in the function definition. Here’s an example of how named parameters work in PHP 8: In this example, I’m calling the greet() […]