A stateless blog with Webmentions
It happened. I have rebuilt my blog using Next.js and Markdown files. It was an opportunity to further improve my React skills and experiment with Next.js' server-side rendering. While doing this, I have decided ...
Jens Segers
Full stack developer with a passion for product development & technology. Engineering manager and Solution Architect at Lighthouse.
Automatically update docker images with Watchtower
Yesterday I ran across an interesting tool for Docker called Watchtower . It runs in the background and monitors your running Docker containers for images updates. If a new image is found, it pulls it and restarts ...
Decoupling releases from deploys using feature flags
So you've been working on this new amazing feature for a while now. You're ready to click the merge button and deploy to production, but your product owner is holding you back because there are still some minor ...
Speed up PhpStorm with Nyan Cat
Tired of waiting on those boring PhpStorm progress bars? Install this Nyan Cat progress bar plugin and make waiting fun again!
Goodbye controllers, hello request handlers
A lot has changed in the PHP landscape over the past years. We started using more design patterns and things like the DRY and SOLID principles. But not a lot has changed for Controllers right?
Dynamic DNS for CloudFlare with ddclient
Today I found out that ddclient added support for CloudFlare since version 3.8.2. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 14.04 ships with version 3.8.1, but I will show you how to update it.
List outdated composer packages
It has been more than a year since I opened a GitHub issue on the composer repository to propose an outdated command. It took a while, but we finally got what we asked!
Protect your server with fail2ban
Fail2ban is a must-have for every SSH-enabled server that is connected to the internet. It protects services such as SSH from illegitimate access.
Find large directories and files on Debian or Ubuntu with ncdu
Time to stop using the find command to search for large directories or files on your servers. There's a neat disk usage analyser tool called ncdu that you should definitely give a try!
Laravel SMTP driver vs. API drivers
After Mandrill changed their pricing model, I (as well as many others) started exploring different transactional email services. Laravel only supports a couple providers out of the box, but what about the others?
Running both PHP 5 and PHP 7 without wasting resources
Installing both PHP 5 and PHP 7 next to each other seems to be fairly simple. In this blog post, I will be showing you how you can free up some resources while you're transitioning to PHP 7. Here's what I did.
List outdated composer packages with Climb
Composer is really missing an "outdated" command like most of the other package managers. Luckily, the Climb package has this covered!
Clearing PHP's OPcache with CacheTool
OPcache is great, it improves PHP performance by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory, thereby removing the need for PHP to load and parse scripts on each request.
Installing PHP 5.6 and Mcrypt on Mac OSX
Years ago I wrote a blog post on how to install the PHP mcrypt extension on OSX. But times change, and here's how you do it, for real.
Getting device information from your visitors
Mobiledetect is awesome, but it doesn't extract information for desktop devices and browser. So I decided to create my own package that extends Mobiledetect; meet the Agent .