Links for February 2016

###PHP Live Regex - A Live Regular Expression Tester for PHP This was super helpful debugging a problem I was having with a horrible PHP regular expression.

###Most developers have never seen a successful project

Most software professionals have never seen a successful software development project, continuous delivery evangelist Dave Farley said, and have “built careers on doing the wrong thing”.

Farley, kicking off the Continuous Lifecycle conference in Mannheim, said study after study had shown that a small minority of software development projects could be judged successes.

One study of 5,400 projects, by McKinsey and Oxford University, showed that 17 per cent of projects were so catastrophically bad they had threatened the very existence of the company.

I find this really hard to believe. I don’t have any hard data to back that feeling up but “17 per cent of projects were so catastrophically bad they had threatened the very existence of the company” just sounds off.

###Haunted by hackers: A suburban family’s digital ghost story

The systematic destruction of Paul and Amy Strater’s lives began with pizza.

Several years ago, pizzas began showing up at the front door of their home in Oswego, Illinois, a middle-class suburb about 50 miles west of Chicago. It might have been a nice surprise, except the Straters hadn’t ordered any pizzas. Someone was sending the pies to their house, unbidden, from every shop in town: Domino’s, Rosati’s, Papa John’s. The orders were always different—sometimes plain cheese, other times an odd combination like pineapples and anchovies—but the routine was the same…

I wish there was an easy way to solve this kind of problem but it doesn’t seem possible without seriously messing up anonymity on the Internet.

###Introducing: Restore Return Refund

We’d like to introduce you to the Backblaze “Restore Return Refund” Program, which is an exciting addition to our Restore By Mail service, and supplements our free web and mobile restore options. Simply put, if you order a flash drive or hard drive restore and then return the drive to us within 30 days we will refund you the entire price of the restore. You can always opt to keep the drive, in which case your payment will cover the purchase of the drive.

I’m guessing this will become the standard for all online backup providers.

###Contrast Ratio

###Interviewing is Broken

###Do not use FOSUserBundle

When starting a Symfony project for a common web application, one of the first thing you need is a way to store users and manage authentication.

Reading the documentation and online tutorial, you are definitely going to install the most popular Symfony bundle of all: FOSUserBundle. And it’s not only a beginner thing, we are all doing it.

I’m new to Symfony but I still think the amount of time saved not writing everything the FOSUserBundle does is great. It also does a good job keeping passwords secure so we don’t have all the horrible problems with unsalted passwords.

###php7cc I ran this on some old code to see if it could be upgraded to php 7 and it was a little scary. :-)

###Software development is code organization

Our code bases get so big and complicated today that we cannot comprehend them all at once. Back in the days of UNIX technical constraints led to smaller code. But the computer is not the limiting factor anymore. We are. Our mind cannot comprehend what we create. Brian Kernighan wrote:

###Ditching Scrum for Kanban — The best decision we’ve made as a team

The following is a story about how we matured as an engineering team. We went from an ad-hoc process to Scrum, and used Scrum for a whole year. Scrum leveled us up as a team in terms of structure and process. But it caused major morale issues. Then we found Kanban. We implemented it and have never looked back.

A good read if you’re interested in either of these management options.