Development

Step Zero and a Half (Take 2)

Yes, I know it’s been a week. I have been very busy 🙂

We are trying to get Vagrant up and running. Last change was enabling the Linux services on Windows. (We being me, with Riaan at my side for tech support 🙂 )

It turns out that was the trick.

This time round, I just needed to run the commands. I got the error that the directory already existed and is not an empty directory, but did an easy fix of going in and deleting the folder. To find the path the command was pwd.

So, on to the next steps.

False alarm, I forgot that we had reached this point last week. So I spent a bit of time searching the Sitepoint forums and I am definitely not the only person who has experienced this error.

Riaan suggested actually installing the WSL. So that’s what’s going on at the moment. The instructions to install WSL are found here.

Ubuntu installed on Windows. Now the next step is to run the vagrant setup through this. Fingers crossed.

So trying to run the install command per the instructions didn’t quite work. The error message was unable to locate package virtualbox, and then the same for virtualbox-dkms and vagrant. Riaan told me to run sudo apt-get update. That’s now running. There is definitely some wait time involved. And while I know that this isn’t actually compiling, it made me think of this XKCD comic:

Installing a new environment also seems to be a legitimate excuse.

This process has been time consuming and despite me having over 30 gigs of free space, the install ran out of space due to Windows grabbing most of that free space to allow for installations to take place. So when the installation failed I needed to run yet another command, and another, and another.

As we sat down to supper, Riaan suggested that I actually follow Vagrant’s instructions instead of those in the book. So that’s what I plan on doing tomorrow.

So to be continued…again 🙂

Step zero and a half: Getting Homestead Set up

The next instruction is actually getting Vagrant to work. And at a first pass the instructions are intimidating and look a lot like Greek to me.

So, deep breathe. Read all the instructions and take it one step at a time.

First command runs, no problem. Breathe a sigh of relief.

Second command – error can’t find the directory. Okay, let’s open up file explorer and see if its there. Found it. But I don’t think that it should actually live in System32. I think that’s going to cause me issues down the line.

Let’s go back three steps.

Run cd.. on Command Prompt. Thanks Dad. I remember you teaching me this before I went into standard 4. Go into my documents path. Now, let’s step forward to the first command again. Actually, before I do that let’s create a folder named PHPNinja. It will be neater that way. Try and switch to it in the cmd prompt. Get an error. Run dir *.* see that I actually named the folder PHPNovice (internal facepalm). Rename the directory. Re-run the change directory command. It works. Small sigh of triumph.

Now, I can really, run that first command again. Run through previous commands using arrows (such a cool trick). Success, again. Will I be able to get past the second step? Let’s see.

Yes success. In the my_project folder. Step 2b. Run mkdir -p Project/public. Get an error. “The syntax of the command is incorrect.” Ok let’s go two steps back again. Run the command exactly as it is in the instructions. Get an error “The system cannot find the path specified.” Let’s run dir *.* to see if my_project is there. The folder is there. Hmm?

Trying the first command again, appending number 2 to my_project. Let’s see if I can make it work.

No dice. I am relatively confident that I have followed the instructions precisely. Let’s switch over to the blog post referenced for more instructions. Same instructions. Same result. Okay, close cmd. Open Git Bash. Success.

Only problem is I am not entirely sure of where the files are now. That’s a problem for later. Let’s see if I can run the final command in the sequence. Success!

Now, background things have been done. Step 4 is to bring up the box. I enter the command and I press enter. And I wait. My cursor flickers. I wonder if anything is happening. After about 10 seconds (I am using an old machine) the command box begins to populate. I think it is now done. What’s the next instruction? I pause, and actually read the command box. It’s busy downloading. So, time to wait. … and wait … and wait some more… 20 minutes and counting (but for more than just the download).

So after lots of waiting, there’s a new error message: default: chown: cannot access ‘/home/vagrant/.composer/’: No such file or directory
The SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status. Vagrant
assumes that this means the command failed. The output for this command
should be in the log above. Please read the output to determine what
went wrong.

A quick Google search shows that the issue should be resolved. I try my luck and re-run vagrant up. It seems to be running. Oops, false alarm. I call in technical support (aka Riaan) after running a vagrant status check. He recommends that I enable the Windows Linux Subsystem. We do that.

But I need to take a break and go and do grocery shopping.

I’m not going to lie. This is frustrating. But I am very grateful for my perspective and background. When this is happening and I have followed all of the instructions, I am not taking it personally or as an indictment of my capacity. And I know that the slowest thing about getting started with any coding project is setting up the environment.

To be continued…

Getting Set up to learn PHP

As I said yesterday, I am getting back into some development. And this means that before I can actually get anything done I need to get the pre-requisites sorted.

My two main editors that I have worked in with HTML and CSS have been Notepad++ (which I love using to share with people because of its incredibly low barrier to entry and being free) and Sublime (which has very cool code completion and pretty themes). However, my Sublime license is more than 3 years old. So before laying out any money for an upgrade I had a quick chat with Riaan and he recommended that I check out JetBrains WebStorm.

Finding the tools

So to get started I am installing:

Git
VirtualBox
Vagrant
JetBrains WebStorm – Not free, but Riaan probably has a license available in his purchases. Downloading a trial version for now.

(Interruption to parent) ( And back online.)

All of the packages are downloaded. Let’s unpack and install

Installing Git

Okay, lots of things that I don’t fully understand here. I am going with if there is a check in a checkbox use that one, and leave everything else blank. Setup completed without any error messages so far, so good.

Installing VirtualBox

Second run (it was in the process of installing Virtual Box that I checked my 2017 assumptions) of installing VirtualBox went smoothly. I do find it interesting that the “Always Trust Software from…” is checked by default. It annoys me in terms of my views relating to consent being ongoing rather than a check-box once off event. But that’s an entirely separate blog series (that may or may not happen).

Remember that things you needed to do in 2017 might not be necessary at the end of 2021

One of the trouble-shooting things that I needed to do nearly five years ago was check whether programs were installing to Program Files(x86) instead of Program Files. And it sort of became an ingrained habit to install to (x86), and I found it interesting that the default path for both Git and VirtualBox didn’t go to (x86). So I did a quick check about the reason that it was necessary to use (x86) and it comes down to needing a work-around for the 32 bit Windows installs. This means that the old habit can be tossed away. And this is a reminder to check my assumptions.

So I had a quick diversion to uninstall Git and VirtualBox, before re-installing them.

Installing Vagrant

Ooh, an MIT license. That’s cool. (Yes, I am a weirdo who will look at which licensing terms are used. Acknowledging that there is a minimal choice in terms of actually accepting the licenses and participating in society…another separate blog post about why organisations like the EFF matter. (The Electronic Frontier Foundation). This is quite a time consuming install.

Installing WebStorm

Or rather the entire JetBrains Toolbox, because as Riaan says, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.” Everything is installed. Oh wait, this is just the toolbox and I actually need PhpStorm not WebStorm. WebStorm is for JavaScript not PHP. Good call on installing the toolbox, and now PhpStorm is doing its installation thing.

And now, ready to restart and get things ready to go. It’s taken about 45 minutes to get things installed. Time for a system restart and then fingers crossed, everything will work.

Getting back into some development

Hello world,

It’s been a while. The good news is the family and I are all as healthy as can be expected in the middle of a global pandemic. It also means that things have not entirely gone according to plan (If they had I would be in second year of a Bachelor of Education degree). But, its perfectly okay to press pause when necessary.

So I am currently not enrolled for an education degree, but I will again. I am aiming to go back to studying in 2023 and although the shortest duration is 4 years I have set a schedule that will probably have me complete the degree in 7 years.

And I have the teeniest bit of time on my hands. I decided that I want to build a library web app with WordPress for my tutor centre. A few years ago I picked up a copy of Building Web Apps with WordPress by Brian Messenlehner and Jason Coleman after hearing Jason speak at WordCamp Cape Town in 2017 with the idea of learning a bit more. (In 2017 I was very much more focused on the website design and development journey).

I am very close to an absolute beginner when it comes to PHP. So when I read the introduction I saw that I need to take a few steps back and dive back into learning PHP. With that in mind, I have logged into my neglected SitePoint premium membership and have chosen to work using PHP & MySQL: Novice to Ninja.

I have also decided to blog this journey – because, I like seeing others learn.

So, here’s to a coding adventure.

Love and coding,
Trisha

A very basic guide to hooks, actions and filters for WordPress

I originally wrote this post in August 2015 and published it on Red Dragon Creative’s site. Subsequently, Riaan and I have made the decision to close Red Dragon Creative and for me to focus on WordPress development under my own name. I still believe that the information in this post is valuable, and so I have chosen to republish it here.

Part of WordPress’s power is the fact that it is so extensible. The tools in the WordPress toolbox to achieve this are hooks, actions and filters. But some of the documentation can be very intimidating, so in less than 200 words I will provide you with a basic guide to hooks, actions and filters.

Hooks simply refer to where your custom code will be executed.

There are two types of hooks: action hooks and filter hooks.
Action hooks do something in your code. (You can either add or remove actions using the very handy and intuitive code: add_action or remove_action)

Filter hooks modify something in the code, so instead of doing something entirely new or different…it simply changes your code. The very intuitive code to add a filter is: add_filter.

That’s it, a very basic guide to hooks, actions and filters for WordPress.

Being a woman in tech

Hello blog,

This is a difficult blog to write and I am not sure where to categorize it. I will probably file it under development, which is where it belongs but it touches on a lot of things.

I am the daughter of a developer and women in tech were a part of my life, where my father spoke of his female colleagues in the same way as he spoke of his male colleagues and work social gatherings included both men and women. So for me, women in tech were not unicorns, and as they were spoken of as being equally competent as men. The first time that I encountered hostility in tech was in a forum and in all honestly it shocked me to the core. Also, being me, it pissed me off, but I dismissed it as being an isolated incident and not a reflection of the general tech community.

For the most part I kept on with tech in the background and I did not pay attention to what was going on in the tech community. In 2015 I went to my first tech meetup hosted by WordPress Joburg. I felt safe and welcome, especially when I made a comment that my ability to attend a meetup on weeknight would depend on getting a baby-sitter for my son and was met with the response of “Bring him with”. I have been an active member of the WordPress Joburg Community ever since and now am one of the co-organizers.

<sidenote> Of course being a woman comes with a level of being aware of background misogyny, both the unintentional systematic misogyny that permeates the world and the deliberate and malicious misogyny that forms part of the day-to-day world. In this regard I have a few advantages, being a white woman from a middle class family who studied law and was warned by my principal in the first few days of my articles about the inherent misogyny of the legal profession and given some tips to ignore it, combined with a low-level of neuroatypicality meant that I generally was able to ignore the effects of misogyny until my thirties.</sidenote>

My first in-person encounter with misogyny in the tech world happened in 2016, where I was made to feel like a completely unreasonable, trouble-making bitch for daring to be anything other than a sycophant when I spoke up at a meetup. In a not atypical reaction I did ask a fellow attendee privately whether I was being oversensitive or whether there was genuine hostility, they too had perceived hostility.

It is against this background that I read the New York Times’s 2014 article “Technology’s Man Problem”. I have some specific thoughts and comments:

Women who enter fields dominated by men often feel this way. They love the work and want to fit in. But then something happens — a slight or a major offense — and they suddenly feel like outsiders.

I never felt explicitly unwelcome in the tech community until the incident I described above, and that incident along with a collection of other comments and interaction made me consider walking away from the tech community 🙁

A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered.

“It’s a thousand tiny paper cuts,” is how Ashe Dryden, a programmer who now consults on increasing diversity in technology, described working in tech.

A thousand tiny paper cuts is an excellent description and if you raise these incidents in isolation you look like you are blowing things out of proportion and if you try to create context by speaking of them in a larger picture you are accused of holding grudges and being hysterical and generally being unreasonable.

“We see these stories, ‘Why aren’t there more women in computer science and engineering?’ and there’s all these complicated answers like, ‘School advisers don’t have them take math and physics,’ and it’s probably true,” said Lauren Weinstein, a man who has spent his four-decade career in tech working mostly with other men, and is currently a consultant for Google.

“But I think there’s probably a simpler reason,” he said, “which is these guys are just jerks, and women know it.”

The choice for people who are uncomfortable with the “bro” culture is to try to change it or to leave — and even women who are fed up don’t always agree on how to go about making a change.

Firstly, yes #notallmen are jerks.
Secondly, I think that we should admit that there is unlikely to be one true way to make the change and should not overly stress about finding a homogeneous solution and be willing to support efforts to effect change even if they are not done the same way as we personally would have implemented them.

Writing code is a high-pressure job with little room for error, as are many jobs. But coding can be stressful in a different way, women interviewed for this article said, because code reviews — peer reviews to spot mistakes in software — can quickly devolve.

“Code reviews are brutal — ‘Mine is better than yours, I see flaws in yours’ — and they should be, for the creation of good software,” said Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and author. “I think when you add a drop of women into it, it just exacerbates the problem, because here’s a kind of foreigner.”

“I’m in no way saying that women can’t take a tough code review,” she added. “I’m saying that no one should have to take one in a boy-puerile atmosphere.”

As I have not worked in an environment with formal code-reviews, I cannot comment. But on anecdotal evidence and based on conversations with both men and women in tech my thoughts on this are:
1. Initially getting used to code reviews is tough. Learning to take any kind of constructive criticism is a skill, and considering that coding is an act of intellectual labour that is often accompanied by strong emotions, it is natural for coders to feel sensitive about feedback.
2. The biggest challenge in any code review is ego and preconceived notions.
3. Some men are intensely threatened by women and resent any feedback them. And I have heard guys say that they are much harsher in their reviews then some of their female colleagues and get far less grief about it.
4. People need to reframe code reviews from being threatening and personal attacks to being a form of mentorship and improvement. (Honestly, has any code not looked at some of their past code and gone “What! Why did I do it this way. I am much better now”

But the debate isn’t over. In fact, Ms. Shevinsky now finds herself in another argument. This time, however, she’s on the defensive with other women.

A prominent feminist in tech told her that she was doing a disservice to women by accepting Mr. Dickinson’s apology and working with him again. The conversation, Ms. Shevinsky said, was “hateful.”

Ms. Shevinsky says that she judges Mr. Dickinson “on his actions, how he is with other people in the company and with me,” and said that there was no contradiction in both working with Mr. Dickinson and supporting feminism in tech.

By virtue of being human people are going to make mistakes and be insensitive and possibly, unintentionally misogynistic. I believe that we should allow people to move on from their mistakes. As I stated above I also believe that we should allow women to have their own agency and allow for a diversity of approaches to women in tech.

Lea Verou, an incoming Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering and computer science at M.I.T., wrote in a much read essay that women-only conferences and hackathons “cultivate the notion that women are these weak beings who find their male colleagues too intimidating.”

“As a woman,” she wrote, “I find it insulting and patronizing to be viewed that way.”

I strongly disagree with this view, and find that these environments allow for a different form of collaboration and openness, and to find it to be an environment that counters systematic, unconscious misogyny as well as outright hostility.

Love and (lots of) thoughts about being a woman in tech,
Trisha