Missing tests - getting everything tested

Unit tests are not often the first thing on someone’s mind when it comes to coding, unless you are in the small group of developers that have become accustomed to writing tests before writing any code. Thanks to the current project I'm busy with I have joined this group.

Due to a few (lame) reasons, unit testing has never been a high priority on Infinitas. In all the wisdom of hindsight unit t…

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Moving EC2 instances across regions on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

the moveWe started using Amazon AWS at work for hosting and I landed up being the server admin. I've been stuck in terminal for more than 3 weeks and not touched a line of code (apart from turning debug on after this move to make sure the cache was cleared) and one awesome bash backup script.

After building a monster development box on AWS to host git (new application), SVN (old application), gitweb, …

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Custom view class - Zend, CakePHP, Symfony and Kohana

There are a lot of sites out there that benchmark frameworks. Every time there is a new benchmark, there is a huge outcry from the loosing sides followers. To date there has not been anything that I know of that has not been bias or meaningful, as the person doing the benchmarking does not know each of the frameworks and its normally a 'hello world' application which is completely pointless as I …

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A few updates to my blog

Super quick today, just activated the twitter plug-in so things will be a little bit more social :). The twitter auth is read only so I wont be doing any funny things to your account when you are not looking

I also added some new modules, down the bottom of every page is some links to other blogs I read. On the right is a box of "latest posts" for quick links to the new stuff.

I have also …

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Huge speed gains for Infinitas

I just pushed some changes to Infinitas that has made a huge difference in the page load times. As you have seen in some of my previous posts, Infinitas serves loads of asset files. On average one JavaScript file and one css file, along with all the images. This equates to around 40 or 50 requests per page.

A little while back I added the code for generating symlinks automatically and although…

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Symlink CakePHP plugin assets for faster page loads

If you are a fan of CakePHP's plug-ins, and want to keep you application non-dependent on plug-ins you have to keep the assets in the plug-ins webroot folder. This might not seem like a bad thing till you realise CakePHP delivers those files via some fread() calls and appropriate headers.

So what you ask? Say You have an application with many plug-ins, things like a gallery, content management…

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