$blog++

I identify as a never nester

December 22, 2022 by Marco Monteiro

It is not uncommon for programmers to use indentation to organize and structure their code. This practice, known as “nesting,” helps to visually group related code blocks and make the overall structure of the code more clear and easy to understand. However I’ve started to addopt something called never nesting. So what is never nesting?

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How to use LSP-intelephense in Sublime Text 4

January 28, 2022 by Marco Monteiro

Always wandered how to setup LSP-Intelephense in Sublime Text 4 so you can have propper validation and code completion? I got you covered.

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Linux not reading the /etc/hosts file

December 21, 2021 by Marco Monteiro

This week I restarted my laptop. That does not happen too often. Mostly when I let the batery run out for some reason. So when I got back into the system I ran into a weird one. My /etc/hosts file was not being read.

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From Sublime Text 3 to Visual Studio Code

March 10, 2021 by Marco Monteiro

I’ve been a Sublime Text user since version 2. I was a early adopter of that version and used it for at least 9 years now. This month I decided to try something new and opt-in for visual studio code.

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Protecting your home network from ads and some telemetry

February 21, 2021 by Marco Monteiro

Recently I've been very interested in this project called Pi-hole. Where you can basically filter all the requests your devices do in your network and just block some undesired behaviours that can occur in your network.

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Manjaro a month after

December 05, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

One month ago I installed Manjaro on my Laptop. In it I installed all the production tools I have on my production machine where I run Pop!OS. Here’s what I found.

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A week on Manjaro Linux

November 07, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

Last week I installed Manjaro Linux on my laptop and since then I’ve been using it as I would my work machine, even though I still use my desktop as my primary machine.

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Trying Manjaro Linux for a month

October 29, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

I’ve been a full time Linux user for the past 4 years. Until now, all I’ve used was Debian distributions. I never in my life even consider a Arch based distro because rolling release distros scared me.

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Permanent Record from Edward Snowden

October 02, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

Permanent Record is a 2019 autobiography by Edward Snowden, whose revelations sparked a global debate about surveillance. It was published on September 17, 2019, by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company.

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How to improve your privacy 1.1 Whatsapp

September 26, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

Whatsapp is one the most used chat apps, basically everyone uses it. Therefore, even if you don’t like it you’re kinda forced to use it if you want to stay in touch with friends and family. There’s a few setting that you might want to change to make it a bit more private.

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How to improve your privacy 1.0

September 19, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

For the last 6 months or so I made it my mission to improve my privacy on the web. This article shows you what changes I made so far and what you can also do to protect yourself.

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Using the Codeigniter 4 standard on your projects with Sublime Text

September 01, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

We moved to Codeigniter 4 for our new projects. Until now, we’ve using phpfmt so everyone in the team can use the same standard while coding.

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Moved my blog to jekyll and hosting it on github

August 22, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

I had my blog on wardrobe and using a normal shared hosting for a long time. Worked out great for my blog and website. However later I’ve been playing more and more with static website generators and see what can be done with them.

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How to setup Codeigniter 4

July 04, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

I started a brand new youtube channel. It’s called TIL Things. As in Today I Learned Things. The idea is to share kinda the same thing I normally do here but in a video format.

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My work setup - 2020 update

June 18, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

It’s mid 2020, Ubuntu has a new LTS release and with it its time to try a few things and actually update. As you know I’m now using Pop!OS a distro based on Ubuntu. I already wrote an entire blog post about it. Now I’m going to show you the actual tools I use at the moment.

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Why I moved from Ubuntu to PopOS!

June 06, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

PopOS! really made a big splash with its new 20.04 release and many long terms Ubuntu users like myself are now considering the change or actually changing. And there’s good reason why this is happening.

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$ exa A modern replacement for ls

April 17, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

You list files hundreds of times a day. Why spend your time squinting at black and white text?

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Covid-19 made us more productive

April 01, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

I manage a small team of 6 including myself. I mostly do quality control stuff at work and I’ve been programming less and less in the past few months, mainly because I’m more involved in the project management side of things. However, there were always a few things that I knew we could do better and wanted to change but it was really hard to find the right time.

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Installing SQLsrv extension for PHP 7.2 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

March 18, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

One of our windows servers got updated to a more recent version of windows and SQLServer. Until then I was using the msSQL extension and was still on PHP 5.6 on our intranet at work.

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Codeigniter 4 snippets for sublime text is here

March 15, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

Codeigniter 4 has been in the works since 2015. It took almost 3 years to have a basic framework working and 2 more to document everything so we can use it in production. This is very exciting news, since codeigniter still holds a place in me. It was PHP framework that I use the most and I still use version 3 at work.

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Dealing with technical debt

March 05, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

Technical debt is just a fancy way of saying that something will bite you in the ass in the long term. However, in every project this is something very real that every Lead Developer has to deal with almost in a daily basis.

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A better man page for your terminal, tldr

January 25, 2020 by Marco Monteiro

I always hated the man pages, I always have a hard time to understand stuff and mostly I have a really hard time finding the option I need.

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Prime OS an android based system for your laptop needs

March 17, 2019 by Marco Monteiro

A few months back I got me a cheap chinese laptop mostly for email, browsing the web, some light reading and watching some videos.

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git refusing to merge unrelated histories

March 12, 2019 by Marco Monteiro

One of the things that happens to me a lot is when I start a new project on my computer that someone else started on our main repo is this error saying that I’m trying to merge unrelated histories.

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How to clean up your environment when using docker

March 10, 2019 by Marco Monteiro

After a few projects we all know that you can have a real mess on your rig. Specially when it comes to saving space. So how to do that?

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Getting started with Docker part 3 - Create your own lamp stack

March 10, 2019 by Marco Monteiro

Let’s work on the following scenario. You are a PHP developer and need a Lamp stack environment to work with.

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How to use vanilla gnome session in Ubuntu 18.04

March 09, 2019 by Marco Monteiro

Gnome if basically my favourite desktop environment, since I moved away from Mac OS and started using Linux full time I tried a lot of flavours. But always ended up back into gnome.

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Conky the light-weight system monitor for X

January 31, 2019 by Marco Monteiro

Conky can display more than 300 built-in objects, including support for:

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What is Git LFS?

January 19, 2019 by Marco Monteiro

I rarely use a Git UI. I mostly use within my text editor or in terminal. However when I do, I use gitkraken. I actually used source tree for a long time but ever since I moved to Linux this is my number one choice. Anyhow, this week I got a newsletter from the guys a gitkraken talking about LFS and I decided to show you guys what it’s used for.

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Tired of signatures that can't be verified when running apt-get update?

January 17, 2019 by Marco Monteiro

If everytime you run sudo apt-get update you get the following error “Err:14 URL HERE The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY PUBLIC_KEY_HERE” and like me you want to fix that. Don’t worry, I got your back.

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Getting started with Docker part 2 - Install Docker Compose

January 15, 2019 by Marco Monteiro

You can run Compose on macOS, Windows, and 64-bit Linux.

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How to get started with Docker part 1 - Installing Docker

January 13, 2019 by Marco Monteiro

Yes, I know! Everyone has been using docker for the last few years but I’m late on that hype train. At work we’re still using vagrant like assholes, that’s my own fault really. I decided to dip my dick into that docker pool and blog the entire process. Here’s the first part.

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Ulauncher the application luncher for Linux

November 03, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

Ever since I moved away from mac and started using Linux as my daily driver there’s been a few minor things that I miss obviously. One of the things is that I never really liked the default application launcher for ubuntu. I always loved the default one mac os has that has a lot of built in functionality. Or if you wanted more on mac you could even install Alfred and that was awesome too.

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Problems pairing Mazda 3 2017 model with Xiaomi ma2 Lite

November 03, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

A few weeks ago I bought me a new phone, the Xiaomi Ma2 Lite. Crazy good phone for the price. More on that here. However, I had a small problem with the phone that was actually driving me nuts. I couldn’t get it to recognize my car.

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Javascript is basically cancer!

September 11, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

Most of us these days have loads of RAM to spare on our laptops and desktops. But do you remember a time when you had a computer just to do some web browsing and just 2GB of ram was what you needed?

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Custumize your grub with Grub Customizer

August 25, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

For those who need to modify the default Grub boot-loader settings, Grub Customizer is a useful tool with a graphical user interface.

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I think I just found my favorite icon pack for gnome

August 08, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

Presenting Flat Remix. Flat remix is a pretty simple icon theme inspired on material design. It is mostly flat with some shadows, highlights and gradients for some depth and uses a colorful palette with nice contrasts.

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How to Create ‘System Restore’ Points in Ubuntu 18.04

August 06, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

Since I moved up all my work stuff into Linux (mostly Ubuntu 18.04) I’ve been exploring more and more on how to perfect my work environment. Last thing we all need is to not have backups in place. Specially if its a work environment. For that we have TimeShift.

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Spotify snap broken with Nvidia driver 396.24.02? I got your back.

July 24, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

Upgraded my Nvidia driver just now from 396.24.0 to 396.24.02, rebooted, and Spotify no longer works. It opens a window but never draws anything but a black screen.

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Start using CLI more and more with mycli

July 18, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

Ever since I moved into Linux I started using the CLI even more. Don’t get me wrong, I used it quite a lot on Mac. However if there was one thing that I normally didn’t use it for was for mySQL. However a few days ago I discovered mycli. Since then I gotta say. Love it!

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git commander another great command line interface tool

July 18, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

This is a git tool that gives more friendly way to navigate your git logs, commit or even diff files. Personally I use git most times inside Sublime Text 3. However its always nice to have a tool like this at hand.

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Using the MSSQL driver to connect to a old SQL server in PHP

July 13, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

One of reasons we had to use PHP 5.6 in one of our recent projets was related to the fact that we needed to get info from the clients ERP, that one only allowed a connection via MSSQL. So after we got the project running with PHP 5.6 instead of 7.2 we had to install the MSSQL drivers.

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Having multiple PHP versions on your dev environment

July 12, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

There’s one of our servers that we use to run small applications for a bunch of clients. At the time when we were configuring this server we ended up choosin PHP 7.2.x as the version that would be used for these clients. However, once we started the development process we needed to connect to the clients ERP. Guess what? That connection needed php version 5.6.x max to work.

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GDPR madness, right?

June 05, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

First let me be clear, I’m not talking about other countries, I’m mainly talking about Portugal here, since its where I live and its obviously where I’m taking all the examples from.

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My linux setup

May 27, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

A few weeks ago I reported that I made the change from Mac to Linux. Since then I tested loads of stuff in Linux to the point where I choose my stuff. Later Ubuntu 18.04 came out and I decided to do a clean install with just the software I wanted.

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Yeah! I'm not using mac anymore

April 04, 2018 by Marco Monteiro

Let’s be clear, I’m still using OSX at work, mostly because there’s no need to change there these days. The computer is already there, so why change?

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My Sublime text 3 config

February 02, 2017 by Marco Monteiro

For the last 4 years or so I’ve been using sublime text 2. I bought the license, therefore I saw no point in upgrading. Until today, when I found out that I could use my ST2 license on ST3 (beta). Today was configuration day and I re-configured editor or choice.

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Are you still using NFS to sync your file over to your virtual box?

January 19, 2017 by Marco Monteiro

For quite a while I must admit I been using this method to sync my files. This has been problematic, files not really syncing in real time can be a pain in the ass, sepecially when you’re making changes on front-end and want to see those changes on the fly.

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Need a legacy vagrant box?

August 06, 2016 by Marco Monteiro

Last week I was contacted by some really old client. You know, the kind of client that you think that they don’t even have the app you made for them online anymore.

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Using PuPHPet and then connecting to your mysql via SSH tunnel

February 21, 2016 by Marco Monteiro

I just did a fresh install of vagrant and built it using the online tool from PuPHPet. Had everything ready but I wasn’t able to connect to my mysql server.

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CodeIgniter Announces an Interim Council

November 05, 2014 by Marco Monteiro

Elislab wanted to focus their development into the product that actually made them money. Nothing wrong about that. They started to look for a someone to take care of Codeigniter. The community started to panic. Months have passed and finally codeigniter has a new home.

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Never Deny Your Users

August 07, 2014 by Marco Monteiro

A few weeks ago I came across a problem that I haven’t had to deal with before. I was visiting a website on my computer, everything was normal. I could see all the information. That was exactly what I was expecting. Later that evening I wanted to show that website to a friend, but I was on my phone. When I got to the website on my phone I got this big message saying the website was not avaiable on my phone. As in, sure they didn’t bother to make a mobile version of the website and that’s ok. Instead they used the time they should be using to make a mobile version of that website to actually block all the users using smaller screens.

Seriously, just show me website in plain text. I wouldn’t mind that, really. Imagine my frustration if I happen to need your contacts. I pick up my phone, go to your website, and just got a message saying that

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Shawn Mccool Laravel.io, A Use Case Architecture

June 27, 2014 by Marco Monteiro

A talk from my buddy Shawn MacCool about command oriented interfaces and domain-events from Laracon in New York City.

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The intern feeling

June 22, 2014 by Marco Monteiro

Every now and again we come across someone that can easily give us the “Intern feeling”. No, not the “Bring me my coffee” feeling. But more of someone that know so much about something that you just want to be around him or her to absorb everything.

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Form Submit == 403 Error?

May 08, 2014 by Marco Monteiro

From time to time, I have to work on a really crappy server. They have the weirdest rules of all, they’re obssed with security. I don’t have a right to see logs, they randomly block my IP from time to time. I can’t even call phpinfo(). Yeah, that bad!

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We are not tools

February 27, 2014 by Marco Monteiro

Yes, this will be a rant. Yes, this will have a lot of cursing involved. If you have any problems with that you should remove yourself out of the premisses. Moving on.

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Git extras

February 10, 2014 by Marco Monteiro

I’m a heavy git user, hence I’m always trying to improve my workflow while using it. I normally have 3 ways of using git. I could use a gui client (sourcetree), normally I do this when I’m preparing a new release.

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Remove the admin bar on wordpress

February 07, 2014 by Marco Monteiro

Yes, lately I’ve been doing some Wordpress stuff. Before you start throwing stones, I’m not doing the kind of stuff to be ashamed about. I’m actually building some blogs.

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How to add another virtual host using Vagrant

January 09, 2014 by Marco Monteiro

There’s a lot of ways to use Vagrant. Some people create a virtual machine per project. I don’t like that idea. I think it’s best to create a virtual machine for each different server you have to deploy. So if I have 2 projects that are going to be deployed to the same server why should I create two virtual machines? Makes no sense to me. Those two projects belong in the same virtual machine.

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How to connect to you database using Vagrant

January 05, 2014 by Marco Monteiro

As you may or may not know, I started to really use vagrant lately. The installation process to get a PHP development environment is quite easy. However, there was a few moment were I run into a small issues. Most of them happened just because my mind was still programmed to work with a simple Lamp stack.

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Getting started with vagrant

January 04, 2014 by Marco Monteiro

Recently I wrote a post about my dev setup on mac. However someone has been recommending me for a while to start using Vagrant. But I never did. Specially because my dev setup was working fine.

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Is 2013 gone yet?

December 29, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Not yet. We still have time to look back. Yeah, it’s that time of the year. Time to think back on what happened this last year. What went wrong and what went well.

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Are you a part of Intranet project?

December 20, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Are you? If you are, this might interest you. I’ve been doing some consultant work where I’m basically putting Intranets to the test. Basically I’m the troll telling people what are they doing right or wrong.

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People won awards that day

December 19, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Last weekend we had our anual christmas party at the office. Until now I was only used to those small Christmas parties. I only worked for small companies and even when I didn’t, normally they did the parties by team and not has a whole company.

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Unsubscribe All The Things

December 14, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

We all been at the place where we find a brand new project that is yet to come. We subscribe the newsletter to be up to date. The project dies, but somehow you keep getting those annoying emails, and doesn’t matter how many times we try to unsubscribe, we just can’t do it.

Unsubscribing from malling lists is probably the most annoying thing on the web today. I can’t count the times I tried to do so, and just can’t. Well, not anymore. Now I use Unroll.me.

With Unroll.me you can unsubscribe from most services in just a few clicks. Personally I unsubscribed from 105 malling lists. Most of them I wasn’t even getting any emails but just to be sure.

Do your self a favor and keep your inbox clean.

unroll.me

Use it and abuse it.

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Chrome Devtools For Mobile

December 09, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Just a few weeks ago the chrome team release yet another awesome feature. You can now truly debug on your desktop as if you were working on your mobile phone or tablet.

This will get your socks off: remote debugging and then we’ll unveil proper mobile emulation.

Paul Irish describes the new feature in depth.

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I would like to express complete and utter disappointment

December 06, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Today we were at the #codeigniter channel on IRC (Freenode). We were discussing who would win the shit job award of the day. I tried to win with a single file website with CSS, JS, HTML and mySQL in one file. I thought I would win. Well I didn’t.

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The Google Geocoding API

November 27, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Geocoding is the process of converting addresses (like “1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA”) into geographic coordinates (like latitude 37.423021 and longitude -122.083739), which you can use to place markers or position the map.

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normalizedSync.php - Single file demo

November 19, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Are you trying to sync de-normalized data from a remote source (e.g. webservice) and struggle importing it into your nicely normalized database? Maybe this little demo might give you an idea!

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Keep your sanity with office pranks

November 14, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

I’ve been part of what we call the work force for a few years now. Worked at a few places before my current job. They were all different. The people was obviously hence the mood/vibe was always changing from place to place, but one thing was the same across the board: office pranks.

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Ross Tuck - HTTP and Your Angry Dog

November 11, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

This was probably one of my favorite talks from Laracon EU 2013. I loved almost everything about it. It was informative, sometimes funny and most of all everyone in the room was interested. What can I say, Ross Tuck is a natural speaker.

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My Dev setup on Mac

November 04, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

I’ve been asked a couple of times about my dev environment: what apps I’m currently using, and how I do use them. I’m going to try and sum it all up, going from terminal to text editor of choice and some of the plugins I have on them.

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Atomic commits

November 04, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

I’m sure this happened to you before, more than one time actually. You have a big file, you changed lots of stuff in it, but those changes are not really related. One may be related to one class and the other to something completely different. Normally you should avoid that, your commits should always be specific to one task, feature or bug. If you do a small search about how to commit better you’ll see that even the commit messages should have this notion.

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Useful tips if you're starting with Git

October 30, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

When I started using Git I wasn’t doing any version control. I was just working on my projects and I just didn’t see any use to it. I wasn’t seeing the long run. Everything seemed like too much work — Branching, staging, stashing, committing — I was confused. But then Git was kind forced on me, since I wanted to contribute to open source projects and almost all of them were (and still are thankfully) using Git I had to learn how to use it. This is what I learned from that process.

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The rubber duck

October 29, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Once upon a time there was a rubber duck! No seriously. We are programmers, we solve problems, and every now and then, we come across problems that we never had to solve before. Once in a while we need help. Maybe we don’t have the know how to solve it. Maybe we’re just too close to the project to even see the real problem. Or maybe, just maybe, we just need someone to talk to, share some ideas and the problem will solve itself.

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Glide.js a simple, lightweight & fast jQuery slider

October 22, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Glide is responsive and touch-friendly jQuery slider. Based on CSS3 transitions with fallback to older broswers. It’s simple, lightweight and fast. Designed to slide, no less, no more. A lot has been said this past few weeks about OOCSS markup, Jędrzej Chałubek (creator of Glide.js) needed simple and fast slider with fully customizable OOCSS markup. If you’re into OOCSS this is the way to go.

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How Designers Destroyed the World

October 20, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Mike Monteiro is a Portuguese/American designer, one of the founders of Mule Design. He’s probably my favorite speaker when it comes to the subject of Design. He wrote one book called Design is a Job that I highly recommend.

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Laracon EU recordings

October 18, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

You may or may not know, but last month I went to Amsterdam for Laracon EU. I wrote a few posts about it. At the time they promised that everything would be recorded so all the devs out there could see it. They promised and they’re now delivering. For now we access to 5 videos, but soon there will be more. Just keep track of Laracon EU youtube channel.

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How to add Previous and Next links on wardrobe

October 17, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

If you’re a regular here you may have noticed that I’m always making some small improvements on my blog. The last one was quite simple, I just wanted to add some previous and next links when the user is reading an article. However, I wasn’t aiming to just simple arrows. I wanted to user to see the title of those articles.

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Bye bye Google Analytics, hello Piwik

October 16, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

I used to love Google Analytics, I’ve been using it for all my personal or client projects. However, the “new” version has been pissing me off more than usual. First I never got used to the new layout. Then the non integration with the google account that you normally have active it’s insane. If I have multiple accounts it always makes me logout from all of them and login with just one. If I’m using just one, it always make me hit the login button.

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Optimize your content for flipboard

October 14, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Ever since I stopped using normal RSS clients I started using apps like Flipboard to read my content. Since then, I notice that some content coming from some sources would look amazing, and some would look awful. So I’ve done some research and noticed that you can improve how your content looks on flipboard.

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The awesomeness of git hooks

October 10, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Automation is probably the word we developers love the most. We’re lazy, that’s why there’s so many Wordpress and Joomla websites. Oh wait I was talking about developers. Those are something different (let’s leave it at that).

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Taking over a big job

October 07, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Every now and again I see people coming up on IRC asking for help. That’s normal, we’re there to help (and share lol cat pictures). However, it always amazes me when someone is asking for something like this:

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Animations using CSS3

October 02, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

I’m not a big fan of big animations on websites. I like to get in, get the thing I was looking for and get out. I hate it if I have to look at your awesome loading animation if the thing I just want is to look at your contacts page.

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PHP the right way

October 01, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Personally I use PHP everyday. It has a lot of things that I don’t like. It’s not the best language in the world, it not perfect. However, it’s flexible and easy to start with.

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Flash is dead... or is it?

September 30, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

A few years back almost every developer made something in Flash. We all hated it, but we had to do it. The client would come into the office and say something like:

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Repo.js

September 27, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

We are developers, we have personal websites, blogs and all that. So from time to time, we want to embed in a blog post or any other type of content a bit of code. There’s a lot of ways to do so. For instance on my blog I use highlight.js. It works fine I don’t have a single complaint about it.

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Top 100 with 18k installs

September 24, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

That’s right, I’m talking about the Codeigniter snippets package for sublime text. The package is now one of the top 100 most installed packages and it has 18k installs.

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Bootstrap Magic

September 23, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

We all know and love Twitter Bootstrap. Or maybe you don’t (in that case here’s a small description: “Sleek, intuitive, and powerful mobile first front-end framework for faster and easier web development.”).

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Go social

September 17, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Nowadays everything is about social networks. My question is, do you have your website prepared for all of that malarkey? Facebook released their open-graph. But is Facebook the only one with it?

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Happy Programmers Day

September 13, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

That’s right, today (Friday the 13th) is Programmers Day.

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HTML5 App Manifest

September 10, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

We all have our applications and we all want then to be always using the best tools, but most of all, we all want our content to get to everyone.

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A sad day for PHP

September 08, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Last week I read one of those articles that you never want to read. Anthony Ferrara also known as @ircmaxell on twitter left the Internals project.

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Le.git

September 07, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

I’m a big git flow fan, no doubt about that. I use it every day and I still think that it is the perfect way to work with a team of people. But, from time to time, you find yourself working on a small project. One that you’re just going to hack during the weekend and you want something simpler.

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Laracon EU (V)

September 05, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

The last day of Laracon was amazing. I must say, I learned a lot. The talks were amazing. All of them, but there was one that I need to reference in particular. Kapil Verma’s talk.

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Internet.org is awesome, but...

September 02, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Apparently Facebook has a new pet. It’s called The Internet. The project has actually some good points.

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Laracon EU (III)

August 31, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

At the end of the first day the legend Fabien Potencier took the stage. If you don’t know who he is, he’s a developer by passion, he started to build websites with PHP5 in 2004 and created the Symfony framework to help SensioLabs, his company, leverage the power of PHP for its customers.

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Laracon EU (IV)

August 31, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

The second day had some really good talks. However there’s one that want to talk for a bit.

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Laracon EU (I)

August 30, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

We gathered at the beautiful Bimhuis. After we all got our credentials and whatnot ready it was time to start.

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Laracon EU (II)

August 30, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

On the second part of the first day, Jordi Boggiano took the stage. Jordi is a lead developer of Composer, the PHP dependency manager that has taken the PHP world by storm.

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Laracon, are you excited?

August 24, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Oh my, did you noticed that Laracon is right around the corner? That’s right, next week I’ll be traveling to Amsterdam for a small geek gathering.

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Pixel density of 538ppi?

August 21, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Full HD displays? Eat your heart out, handset manufacturers. LG Display has just laid claim to the world’s first Quad HD (2,560 x 1,440) smartphone display, which also boasts the highest pixel density of a mobile device, clocking in at 538ppi.

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The CH experience

August 19, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Earlier this year I got out of the previous company I was working for. My plan was simple. Earn enough money to live on my own as a freelancer.

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Wardrobe a minimal blogging application

August 15, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

As you may or may not know last week I migrated all my content from tumblr into this new cms called Wardrobe. For now I’m really happy with it. It gives me total control over my content and it doesn’t have all those features that most blogging platforms have. Features that I never needed in the first place.

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PuPHPet

August 13, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

PuPHPet is a simple GUI to set up virtual machines for PHP development.

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A New Face

August 09, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

My tumblr experience ended. It was good while it lasted but we had to part ways. You changed the way people manage and write their posts and I didn’t like that one bit.

Then I found this little project called Wardrobe built in Laravel 4 and I was in-love. Editor in markdown and a base templates focussed on the reading experience.

Took me one literally one days work to migrate all my articles and comments. First I used the jekyllrb plugin to export all my articles from tumblr. Then I imported everything into wardrobe in no time. The comments was the worst part, I had to change all the slugs to match them. After that I was good to go.

Couple of changes to the template and BAM I got myself a blog platform.

Best part is that since it’s built in Laravel 4 I can now play around with it and add more functionality to it.

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The creative badge

July 30, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

I’ve been working in the creative business for a while now, and being around people that need to be creative for a living can have it’s advantages, and disadvantages.

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Laracon here I come!

July 15, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

That’s right, I just won a VIP ticket to Laracon. I’m not going to lie - it would be hard for me to go without this. Being a portuguese developer is not that easy these days.

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Hands-on Testing with PHPUnit - review

June 25, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

One of the things that is actually starting to matter in our PHP world is testing. THe PHP community disregarded this for far too long. However, more modern frameworks took this issue seriously and the community responded well.

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Sublime pro tip CTags

June 06, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

One of the best features about the new version of Sublime that is now in beta is probably the goto definition. That was actually the main feature that was making me consider the update. However, now you can have that feature in your sublime text 2 powered by CTags.

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A message from the future

May 21, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

This is a message from the future for you. Yes, you! The guy that is still using Google Reader completely unprepared for what is about to happen.

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Git ProTip Rebase Commits into smaller commits

May 16, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Yeah, that’s right. If you’re like me you have a small compulsion to commit every small task you complete. In some cases that can be a good practice. However, when you’re working with a large team, or even on a open source project that has lot’s of contributors that can be a PITA in the long run. Imagine you’re looking for all the changes done while creating a feature, and your history is full of small commits. Finding what you’re looking for is not going to be easy.

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Laravel Amsterdam Conference

May 04, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

That’s right, with the US laracon finished it’s time to start thinking about the next one, and they are. In this case, if you’re interested in this just go here and show your interest.

Take the survey and let’s make this happen.

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Font Awesome

April 30, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Do you use bootstrap? Who am I kidding, of course you do.

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Can't get to Laracon? You're in luck!

February 07, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

First thing this morning (a little past midnight UK time), a guy by the name of Chris Borgia posted a campaign on indiegogo. The campaign, “Film Laracon” is pretty self-explanatory. In the project summary he pointed out that there were no plans for the talks to be recorded, meaning those of us unable to attend Laracon would be left out of the mix. As it happens, Chris already owns the relatively wide range of gear necessary to record a conference and he’d managed to secure a slot on the guest list, so all he had to cover was the cost of a hotel and parking at a total of $560.

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Php Fig The Php Framework Interop Group

February 04, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

The idea behind the group is for project representatives to talk about the commonalities between our projects and find ways we can work together. Our main audience is each other, but we’re very aware that the rest of the PHP community is watching. If other folks want to adopt what we’re doing they are welcome to do so, but that is not the aim.

There’s a few ways to get involved into this thing:

  • Join the malling list.

  • Get on the IRC Chat #php-fig.

  • Start using PSR-0 / PSR-1 / PSR-2 / PSR-3 in your code styles.

  • Check out the github page for the fig standards.

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Laravel Starter front to back

January 08, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

I just finished reading this book, so it’s now time to give it the review it deserves. First and foremost this is a really small book that you can read in hours. However you shouldn’t judge a book by its weight. Even though the book is small, it’s actually full of useful content. Like any other book about a framework, it starts by walking the reader into the process of downloading and getting started with the framework. Getting everything ready on all the operating systems. The second part of the book walks the reader into making his own web-application. This is when it starts getting interesting. The thing I liked the most about the book is that Shawn didn’t focus on the usual subjects. He could’ve skipped the migrations subject entirely and just give the reader the necessary code to create the users table. But he didn’t, he used the migrations and moreover he explains the importance of using migrations while developing web-applications, especially while working with a team.

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The bittersweet news

January 07, 2013 by Marco Monteiro

Well since I’m now working as a freelancer I now have a bit more power over what framework should be used for this or that project. Therefore, I think I’m not going to use Codeigniter by choice anymore. This means I’ll use it if the client requests it. Or if by any chance I’m working with someone else that is only familiar with CI and not Laravel. Also I still need to support a lot of applications that were built with CI, and since the code doen’t re-write itself I’m going to continue with Codeigniter on those.

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Is 2012 gone yet?

December 31, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Yeah, that’s right. It’s gone, vanish, it’s in fact the past now. So let’s look back and see what 2012 as done.

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2013

December 28, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Looks like the world didn’t end after all. I’m disappointed. So what’s going to happen in 2013?

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So you're a webdeveloper. Where's your Digital Footprint?

December 20, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Something that always amazed me is the amount of webdevelopers I happen to find on the web with literally almost no Digital Fooprint. Specially with people that I find on Freenode.

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I Used To Be A Blogger But Then I Took An Arrow To The Knee

December 14, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

My fellow readers, you probably didn’t noticed but I’ve been off the grid for the last 2 or 3 weeks. I had a minor problem with my knee. My real knee, not my skyrim knee. Therefore, I wasn’t able to blog much for the past weeks. Or even try new things to blog about.

Ironically I made a new skyrim character during the past two weeks and I played a lot of xbox. But hey, I’m back to business now and it’s time to start over.

I’m planing a screencast series and I also have a few articles lined up. I’m excited about it. What about you?

I hope you’re still on the other side of the Interwebs waiting for my dumps of information.

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Composer + Oh-My-Zsh

November 23, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Oh-my-zsh is a community driven framework that you can use to manage your zsh configuration.

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Ghost In The Wires

November 20, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while. I was also postponing that start because I knew one thing - as soon I would start reading I was not going to stop (I was right).

First don’t be afraid, even if you don’t have any knowledge of networking, hacking or something like that you’ll be alright reading this. But still, if you have such skills, don’t worry, the book is entertaining and amazing either way.

The Mitnick’s story is just mind blowing.

By Kevin D. Mitnick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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Codeigniter wiki was awesome!

November 19, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

One of the best things about using Codeigniter is obviously the community and how easy it is to find solutions to your problems. You have a lot of options, the IRC channel, the forums, the awesome documentation and you had the wiki.

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To Hmvc Or Not To Hmvc

November 18, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

I’ve been trying some stuff out on Laravel 3 and also Laravel 4. One thing that I like about laravel 3 is the use of bundles. Making it easy to re-use your code, which makes the application modular and so forth.

While in Codeigniter I never missed this feature, well at least not until I had a taste of what it really was using other frameworks. Now I think I’m going to try and use the HMVC pattern with Codeigniter.

When I first made my research I ended up here: codeigniter modular extensions hmvc after reading the wiki and talking about it with the folks at #codeigniter (Freenode) I think this is the way to go.

So what is this HMVC thing?

Modular HMVC means modular MVC triads. Modular Separation and Modular Extensions allows related controllers, models, libraries, views, etc. to be grouped together in module directories and used like a mini application. But, Modular Extensions goes one step further and allows those modules to …talk“ to each other. You can get controller output without having to go out through the http interface again.

I think on my next project I’m going to stop using sparks and MVC. I shall embrace composer and HMVC. Until now I’ve been using composer and sparks at the same time but that’s gotta stop.

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Pagodabox FTW

November 16, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

I know, this is going to sound like a promotion post. Guess what, it is. I’m hosting my website (marcomonteiro.net) there for free so I guessed this was the least I could do for them. So what so great about it?

  • It’s not hosting, it’s a hosting framework.
  • Priced based on monthly usage.
  • Deployment of apps through a Git-based system.
  • It’s beautiful.
  • Scalable.
  • Completely free for open source projects.

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Yoda Conditions

November 14, 2012 by Marco Monteiro
	if  ( 5 == count)

Lately I picked up on this thing called Yoda Conditions. I started using this on a new project I’ve been working on. First it was a bit odd I must say, but once I got into it boy do I love to declare my conditions like this.

The big upside from this is that when you’re reading the code you actually see the expected result first. You can actually see that on the image example.

The term “Yoda Conditions” was coined by zneak a stackoverflow user.

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The "go rogue" philosophy

November 03, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time now. The problem was I never quite find the right words to do it.

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Community is a Beautiful Thing by @machuga

October 30, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Today I witnessed a beautiful thing emerge from an awful situation.

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Untested reinvention? Are you sure?

October 25, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

There’s one thing that has been bothering me a lot lately. It really “grinds my gears” when web-designers try to reinvent concepts that are well founded and tested. Let’s get one thing out of the way, I’m not against reinvention. But one shouldn’t just reinvent with the only purpose of being different. Why am I writing about this in the first place? Well last week I tweeted this:

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How To Use Codeigniter Docs Inside Sublime Text 2

October 20, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

How The Internet Will (one Day) Transform Government

October 16, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

The open-source world has learned to deal with a flood of new, oftentimes divergent, ideas using hosting services like GitHub — so why can’t governments? In this rousing talk Clay Shirky shows how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens.

Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible — with deep social and political implications.

It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. … It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal.

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Php magic methods - The complete guide

October 07, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

PHP has a few ‘magic’ methods that you can use in OOP (Object oriented programming). All of them must be identified with two underscore prefix and they act as interceptors that will run then certain required conditions are met. So as you can see these methods are extremely useful.

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The Unexpected Bounce Rate

October 04, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Ever since I moved my blog to tumblr I’ve been keeping a close eye on my analytics account. That’s because there’s a lot of articles out there that don’t say good things about tumblr and its power when it comes to SEO. My blog as been having a fair amount of visits, and for that I must say - Thank you - However, I found something really strange on my analytics page. The average visit duration could go up to 3 minutes, but at the same time I was getting a extremely high percentage of bounce rate, something like 90%.

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The Six Months Rule

September 30, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Last week I had to make some changes into a really old project. The problem was: when I started, I didn’t remember how old the project really was.

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Starting with PHPUnit

September 25, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Last week I told you all about my next set of articles on my blog. My main focus will be PHPUnit and Composer. Not because I’m an expert about the subject, but for the exact opposite — I’m learning as I go. Let’s define “the thing” first.

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Starting With Composer

September 19, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

I’m just getting started with Composer. I’ve been reading a lot about it and I think it’s the way to go. I don’t know many common developers (like me) that are already using it, but I’m going to give it a go. No more Git articles for you. From now on the two main subjects on my blog will be Composer and Unit Testing, since I decided that’s what I’m going to do next. What is this thing called Composer?

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Are You A Merge Or Rebase Guy

September 18, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

I know, by now you read almost every tutorial about how to get started with git. You know how to create your repo, add stuff to it and push to your remote. You started branching and everything is now great. Then you read the term Rebase somewhere and think - who wants that? I have Merge.

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Is It Really That Bad That Codeigniter Has A Slow Release Cycle

September 16, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

In one of our breaks from the discussion “vi vs emacs” on the IRC Codeigniter channel we ended up discussing the slow release cycle of our favorite framework. There were some who didn’t like that about Codeigniter, but fortunately we had some people in the channel that were able to give some good points about the other side. A lot of people don’t like that codeigniter is not in the cool kids group anymore. Well that’s ok, I bet the community using the framework was not using it just because it was cool (if you’re using it for that reason, you’re doing it wrong). First let’s get some things out of the way. I love working with Codeigniter and I use it for almost all of my projects. But I’m not here to talk back at people that don’t use codeigniter. People should use what is best for them, or to the task they need to complete.

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Yes, you should be using git-flow

September 11, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

I’ve been talking a lot about git these days, and I still have a few articles to do about it. With that in mind today I’m here to talk to you a bit about git-flow.

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Nothing to do this weekend? Try Git.

September 06, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Over the last month I blogged about a lot of stuff that is related to code versioning in one way or another. I think it’s clear by now that the best tool out there for that is Git (this is just my humble opinion).

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My mistress has a name, its called Laravel

September 04, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

That’s right, I finally gave it a go and spent some time with my new mistress. I only played around with it for a few hours and I’m already blogging about it. That’s how cool it is. Laravel is a clean and classy framework for PHP web development. Freeing you from spaghetti code, Laravel helps you create wonderful applications using simple, expressive syntax. Development should be a creative experience that you enjoy, not something that is painful. Enjoy the fresh air.

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Codeigniter Handbook Vol. 2 Api Design

September 03, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

The CodeIgniter Handbook, a three-volume handbook full to the brim with pragmatic, succinct, useful information from one of the web’s pioneering developers. Learn about the whats & whys of writing cleaner, more concise code. Discover fascinating new techniques that allow you to remove duplication, increase your programming efficiency, and reduce those repetitive tasks. Fall in love with CodeIgniter all over again.

In today’s world the focus in web development has firmly shifted from isolated systems to interconnected networks of applications, all talking to each other in real time. CodeIgniter’s flexibility makes it very easy to create Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and allow your applications to chat to each other.

In this book, you’ll learn the principles behind modern RESTful API design as well as a bunch of helpful implementation details, such as how to version your APIs, how to use HTTP to specify content types and how to extend and debug your APIs with useful homegrown tools.

I bought the 1st volume on paper when I was at Ciconf2012 UK, since Jamie Rumbelow does so much for the community I think the least I can do is buy his books. So this is what I’m currently reading, the second volume.

If you want to buy his book all you have to do is go here and do so. If you can’t afford the paper version the ebook version is quite cheap.

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The Tumblr Experience

September 01, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

As you may, or may not know I moved my blog from a self hosted wordpress to a tumblr blog. Some may disagree with that, but what the hell it’s done. And now I’m going to tell you how’s my experience with it so far. The Migration Process

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So You Use Dropbox For Version Control You're Awesome

August 30, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

If you follow my blog, or are even a casual visitor you know at least 2 tools I use everyday. Codeigniter and Git. I use them for lots of reasons, but most of all because they make my life and the team I work with easier. Moving forward. One thing that I’m constantly doing is trying to improve my foo while using these two tools. Usually I’m on IRC talking with other developers that have the same interests, or just sharing lolcats. But every now and then, a guy shows up while we’re talking about Git and version control. I’m talking about a regular developer, a well intentioned one, that also wants to learn new stuff. But then he says the following:

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Git vs Svn is it really a battle?

August 27, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Since I wrote that last post on how to update your codeigniter installation with git, I got a question on why use git? (at least this time was why use git, and not why use any kind of version control). Normally I post some of my posts on Forrst, and there was the place the question took place. Take a look:

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Thank You!

August 25, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

I’m just here to tell you that the Codeigniter Snippets package for Sublime Text 2 just reached the 6400+ installs. This couldn’t be possible without the awesome community that Codeigniter has. Therefore I think it’s appropriate to thank everyone that supported the project, and most of all, the contributors.

Without any delay I added a list of all the contributors to the readme file. So if by any change you happen to contribute to the project in the future, be sure to add your name to the readme.

Once again, thank you.

Github: ci-snippets

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Codeigniter Pagination Re Use Query Strings

August 23, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

A few months ago I had a problem. I was paginating some results based on some data the user had provided. So I needed to be able to pass that data from page to page during the pagination process. First I set to read the Codeigniter documentation to see if it was possible to do that with the pagination library.

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Updating your Codeigniter installation with git

August 21, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Ever since Codeigniter moved from Bitbucket to Github I craved for one easy way to update my applications every time a new version gets out. Turns out there is none. And as you can see here, the updating process is always kinda boring specially if a major version is out. Since the version 3.0 is around the block I’m going to show you how I normally upgrade my codeigniter applications. First things first, I’m assuming that you work with git in your normal day to day workflow. If you don’t use it, or even worst don’t know how to use it, stop reading this and without further delay go learn how to use it. (You can check this link for that!).

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My Blog Now Lives At Blog.marcomonteiro.net

August 09, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Just dropping by to tell you that I moved my blog from a self hosted wordpress blog to a tumblr blog. And now I’m using a sub-domain for my blog.

The main reason behing this decision was just the fact that I was not happy with my hosting and therefore I’m moving all my stuff away from them.

Tumblr looks like a good free option to me.

ps: I’m sorry if all the feed are going crazy and they apear all marked as unread. That’s because all the posts have a new link now, there’s no need to update your feed though.

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Spark bash helper

July 14, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Ci-presenter library for Codeigniter

June 09, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Lunk.it Secure And Private Communications

May 30, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

A month ago I was chitchatting with the awesome people from the Internet (I was on IRC) and I got a private message a guy that I know from there from a long time. He wanted to ask me what I thought about a project that he was starting with some friends. The project was called Lunk.

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Back On The Gaming Scene Why Not

May 13, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

I was a hardcore online gamer for a while. Specially when I was in college (we all know how that is). However since I switched from Windows to OSX I stopped doing that. So I bought a xbox360 and now I do 90% of my gaming there. Even if I have some cool online games on Xbox I miss two types of games: Poker online and MMORPG’s.

The first one I resolved it very quickly, found partypoker since it was one of the few that actually had a pkg for a OSX app (most of the ones I found didn’t) and the payment system works quite well.

Now the second part was not easy at all. First I found wurmonline but the java application was always crashing on mac. Then I tried Dungeon Hunter Alliance (bought it on the mac app store) and it is quite good.

So I think now I’m happy on my gaming thing. I have skyrim on my xbox, Party Poker to spend (or make) some money, and Dungeon Hunter Alliance to just hanging around and talk to some peeps.

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Using Sublime Text 2

April 30, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Since I’ll be using sublime Text 2 on all my screencasts from now on, I thought I might do a little screencast about it first. I hope you enjoy.

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What Bugs Me About Shorten Url's

April 29, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

When shorten url’s showed up for the first time they were great. We were starting the 140 characters era, and we wanted to share our stuff on the web. The problem was (and still is) that many url’s that point to the stuff we wanted to share were way to big. Just look at those url’s from amazon.

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Using The Sparks System With Kittens

April 23, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

This is my first screencast, I’ve done it without any script. I used it just to try out the screencast software and to actually see if I should start doing this or just stay with the written articles.

Please leave feedback on things to improve.

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Adopt Kitten Helper For Codeigniter

April 19, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Need a placeholder? Like kittens? Use Codeigniter?

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Codeigniter Snippets Package for Sublime T. 2

April 13, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

A few weeks ago I was at #codeigniter @freenode.net as usual, and we were talking about Sublime Text 2 (because it’s an awesome text editor and you should start using it right now) and we’re talking about how there was no package for Codeigniter with Snippets made just for it.

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Something happened this week, something really good

March 10, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

One of the things that was really annoying me at work was that some of the people there was still 1995 and coding in a team without using any kind of version control.

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Ciconf2012 @London

February 24, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

Last weekend I was in London, mostly to attend to Ciconf. However I think it’s safe to say that one of the main reasons was to just to be around wonderful people. The actual Ciconf

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February awesomeness ahead

January 23, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

It’s been a while since my last blog post, mostly because I had a lot of stuff happening at the same time. Both at the end of last year and the beginning of this one. So you’re probably wondering what is happening in February right? (probably not, but I’ll explain it anyway)

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Codeigniter - Thumb Helper

January 20, 2012 by Marco Monteiro

I’ve created a small thumbnail helper for codeigniter and I’d like to get some feedback from you guys.

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Codeigniter Video Helper

November 20, 2011 by Marco Monteiro

Over the weekend I’ve written a small helper since latterly almost all of my projects have to work with youtube or even with vimeo. This is a helper to work with Codeigniter obviously.

Has usual I’ll give you guys the link to github. If you have any suggestions or have any issues with it, just post it on github. Also you’re free to fork it and add awesomeness to it.

Gihub repository

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In Maintenance

October 24, 2011 by Marco Monteiro

I’m here with some bad news, or perhaps not. Will see. What I know for sure is that I will moving my website and my blog out of here. I’m sick and tired of trying to talk with someone at hocnet and just couldn’t. Even the process of renewal is a real pain.

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Commun.it

October 10, 2011 by Marco Monteiro

Recently I had an invite to Commun.it and I thought to myself, well I’ve never used a service to manage my community on twitter so I might has well give it a try. Commun.it is basically a service that let you know how to interact better with your community, the users that influence more and the one that you should consider to unfollow and follow.

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Copywriting for geeks

October 04, 2011 by Marco Monteiro

For the past weeks I’ve been reading some material about a lot of subjects on the web like SEO, Responsive Webdesign, SocialMedia and whatever piece of information I can get my hands on that can give a bit more know how about every aspects of the web. And last month I had a two weeks vacation (check the link to see everything I’ve accomplished from my todo list) I had some more time for the reading department. During that time I’ve come across with this book by Marc-André Cournoyer.

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The new Gowalla approach

September 24, 2011 by Marco Monteiro

This week Gowalla released a new mobile app both for Android and IOS. When I heard this I was so excited. I’m not using gowalla for that long, I used foursquare when I started checkin into places. But lately I noticed that I had much more real friends on Gowalla than foursquare. So I changed to Gowalla and I love it.

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Why Disqus?

September 13, 2011 by Marco Monteiro

You may noticed that a few weeks ago I removed the normal comment system from my blog and added Disqus to it. Mainly I did this because of this tweet. I was getting too much spam on my comments.

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Vacation check-list

September 08, 2011 by Marco Monteiro

Looks like I’m on a two week vacation. Nothing better than do a simple check-list for the next two weeks so I don’t end up playing xbox all the time and nothing productive will come out of it.

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Codeigniter? Damn right Codeigniter!

September 04, 2011 by Marco Monteiro

I’m a CodeIgniter lover, user and abuser. This is how I normally describe myself when I have to tell someone something about one of the greatest tools I’ve worked so far in webdevelopment and what I do with it. By now, if you worked with me at some point you know that I use CodeIgniter almost every day and I never get bored with it. And I hope to make you at the very least try it, if not, at least try to insight you in why I’m using it. How did I discovered CodeIgniter?

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The Semantic Grid System

August 28, 2011 by Marco Monteiro

A lot has been going on this year about responsive webdesign. Personally I think this is a great thing that finally webdesigners are awaken for the reality that webdesign can no longer be produced for one platform but for many.

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Github, Reactor, And V2.0.3

August 21, 2011 by Marco Monteiro

If you are following CICON 2011 yesterday, then you no doubt already heard from the Reactor team: CodeIgniter is now using Git for source control, and has moved its home to GitHub. Also, CodeIgniter …Core“ is not longer being publicly maintained. CodeIgniter …Reactor“ is CodeIgniter, so we are dropping that suffix. In short: CodeIgniter is the framework, and Reactor is our community driven development program.

Lastly, version 2.0.3 was released today, download it here or from the release tag at GitHub.

For full details of our switch to Git, head over to the EllisLab blog.

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Why use a cms?

November 20, 2010 by Marco Monteiro

A while ago i received an e-mail with a future subject to write about on my blog and i was really glad, since that ment two things, people are reading and most of all are interested in my opinion. Therefore this week post will be all about free stuff and all you can actually make with it on the webdesign / webdev world. First i should show you guys the message that brought this subject here:

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My Way Of Styling Part Ii

November 08, 2010 by Marco Monteiro

Last week i explained how to structure a good signature on your code and why. This week i’ll be explaining how i do my css coding and how i structure my files. First of all i’d like to point you to some useful websites that can help you get started coding with css. Ok now the next part and i’ll try to keep it clean and simple. First, how to divide my document? Well i do it the same way every single time. Top to bottom. So let’s imagine that your site is going to have this sections:

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New Rss Feed

October 28, 2010 by Marco Monteiro

Dear visitor, if you have already subscribed to my rss feed i ask you one small favor: unsubscribe it and subscribe it again from the icon i have at the bottom of the page or use the image from this post.

I’m asking this because i have forgotten to add my feed to feedburner therefore i wasn’t able to monitor your subscriptions. Also now you can see all the post in my feed, because if you are like me you want to be able read almost everything just in your rss client.

I’m very sorry for the inconvenient but i think this will benefit both you and me.

Have a nice Halloween

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My Way Of Styling Part 1

October 26, 2010 by Marco Monteiro

Well i’m a webdeveloper, therefore much of my work is making an idea come to reality, or making the website “alive”. That can be achieved with css among other things. This is my favorite thing to do on my daily work, styling a website. With this article i’ll be trying to show my process of doing this.

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Hello There

October 13, 2010 by Marco Monteiro

Hello there and welcome to my blog.

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