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Deploying (Minecraft) Servers Automatically with Terraform

By Zed Jensen
July 16, 2020

Last year I bought an old Dell Optiplex on eBay to use as a dedicated Minecraft server for my friends and me. It worked well for a while, but when my university switched to online classes and I moved home, I left it at my college apartment and was unable to fix it (or retrieve our world save) when it failed for some reason. I still wanted to play Minecraft with friends, though, so I had to figure out a solution in the meantime.

I’d previously used a basic DigitalOcean droplet as a Minecraft server, but that had suffered with lag issues, especially with more than two or three people logged in. Their $5 tier of virtual machine provides 1GB of RAM and 1 CPU core, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that it struggled with a Minecraft server. However, more performant virtual machines cost a lot more, and I wanted to keep my solution as cheap as possible.

I mentioned this to a co-worker and he pointed out that most companies don’t actually charge for virtual machines on a monthly basis; in reality, it’s an hourly rate based on when your virtual machine instance actually exists. So, he suggested I create a virtual machine and start my Minecraft server every time I wanted to play, …

Random Strings and Integers That Actually Aren’t

By Josh Williams
July 2, 2020

Image from Flickr user fsse8info

Recently the topic of generating random-looking coupon codes and other strings came up on internal chat. My go-to for something like that is always this solution based on Feistel networks, which I didn’t think was terribly obscure. But I was surprised when nobody else seemed to recognize it, so maybe it is. In any case here’s a little illustration of the thing in action.

Feistel networks are the mathematical basis of the ciphers behind DES and other encryption algorithms. I won’t go into details (because that would suggest I fully understand it, and there are bits where I’m hazy) but ultimately it’s a somewhat simple and very fast mechanism that’s fairly effective for our uses here.

For string generation we have two parts. For the first part we take an integer, say the sequentially generated id primary key field in the database, and run it through a function that turns it into some other random-looking integer. Our implementation of the function has an interesting property: If you take that random-looking integer and run it back through the same function, we get the original integer back out. In other words…

cipher(cipher(n)) == n

…for any integer …

Improving max() performance in PostgreSQL: GROUP BY vs. CTE

By David Christensen
June 30, 2020

Photo by Maxpax, used under CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped from original.

When working with large tables, even simple actions can have high costs to complete. What queries are acceptable for smaller tables can often be less than ideal when applied to large tables, so your specific choice of approach to a given problem becomes more important.

Note: We are using PostgreSQL 12, which supports some nice features like parallel btree index building, which can speed up parts of this process compared to earlier versions. We are using the default settings for this, which lets PostgreSQL use up to 2 parallel backend workers to speed up some operations.

Say you have a table table_a with multiple grouping fields field_a and field_b and you want to find the maximum value of another field field_c for each group.

The direct approach is to do something like the following:

SELECT field_a, field_b, max(field_c) FROM table_a GROUP BY 1,2;

This is functional and very straightforward. However, even if you have an index on (field_a, field_b, field_c), this can end up taking quite a long time if the tables are large. Let’s look at an actual example and the numbers we use.

First, let’s create our table:

CREATE …

Randomly spacing cron jobs

By Jon Jensen
June 30, 2020

Cron is the default job scheduler for the Unix operating system family. It is old and well-used infrastructure — it was first released 45 years ago, in May 1975!

On Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like systems, you can see any cron jobs defined for your current user with:

crontab -l

If nothing is printed out, your user doesn’t have any cron jobs defined.

You can see the syntax for defining the recurring times that jobs should run with:

man 5 crontab

Important in that document is the explanation of the space-separated time and date fields:

field          allowed values
-----          --------------
minute         0-59
hour           0-23
day of month   1-31
month          1-12 (or names, see below)
day of week    0-7 (0 or 7 is Sunday, or use names)

A field may contain an asterisk (*), which always stands for "first-last".

For example, to make a job run every Monday at 3:33 am in the server’s defined time zone:

33 3 * * 1 /path/to/executable

Random interval scheduling

Sometimes it may be good to schedule a cron job to run at a somewhat random time: generally not truly random, but maybe at an arbitrary time within a specified time range rather than at a specific recurring …

Job opening: PHP / JavaScript developer

By Jon Jensen
June 29, 2020

This position has been filled. See our active job listings here.

We are looking for a PHP software engineer to work with us during business hours somewhere in the UTC-7 to UTC-4 time zones (U.S. Pacific to Eastern Time). This role can be full-time or part-time.

We are an Internet technology consulting company based in New York City, with 50 employees serving many clients ranging from small family businesses to large corporations. The company turns 25 years old this year!

Even before COVID-19 most of us worked remotely from home offices. We collaborate using SSH, GitHub, GitLab, chat, video conferencing, and of course email and phones.

What you will be doing:

• Develop new web applications and support existing ones for our clients
• Work together with End Point co-workers and our clients’ in-house staff
• Use your desktop OS of choice: Linux, macOS, Windows
• Use open source tools and contribute back as opportunity arises

What you bring:

Professional experience developing and supporting web applications in these technical areas:

• 5+ years of development with PHP and front-end JavaScript
• Frameworks such as Symfony, Laravel, Magento and Vue.js, React, Angular
• Databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Solr, Elasticsearch, etc.
• Security …

Magento 2: Creating a custom theme

By Juan Pablo Ventoso
June 24, 2020

Photo by Maria Eklind, CC BY-SA 2.0

In my previous post, we went through the steps needed to create a custom module in Magento 2. While modules consist of a set of classes to add new features to Magento, a theme controls how these features, and the entire website in general, will be displayed to the user. As stated in the Magento guide, a theme uses a combination of custom templates, layouts, styles, and images to provide a consistent look and feel across a Magento store.

Creating a new Magento 2 theme

We can create a theme based on a default “parent” theme or create a standalone theme from scratch. In most cases, I would recommend the first option. For this example, we will use Luma as our parent theme. The other option would be inheriting from the default “blank” theme.

Here’s an initial task list to get our new theme ready:

• Create a new directory for the theme
• Create the registration.php script
• Create the theme.xml information file
• Activate the new theme

Creating a new directory for the theme

While all our backend code should go in app/code, the frontend content is expected to go in app/design. And as our theme will only apply design changes to the frontend content, we should …

Linux Development in Windows 10 with Docker and WSL 2

By Kevin Campusano
June 18, 2020

I’m first and foremost a Windows guy. But for a few years now, moving away from working mostly with .NET and into a plethora of open source technologies has given me the opportunity to change platforms and run a Linux-based system as my daily driver. Ubuntu, which I honestly love for work, has been serving me well by supporting my development workflow with languages like PHP, JavaScript and Ruby. And with the help of the excellent Visual Studio Code editor, I’ve never looked back. There’s always been an inclination in the back of my mind though, to take some time and give Windows another shot.

With the latest improvements coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux with its second version, the new and exciting Windows Terminal, and Docker support for running containers inside WSL2, I think the time is now.

In this post, we’ll walk through the steps I took to set up a PHP development environment in Windows, running in a Ubuntu Docker container running on WSL 2, and VS Code. Let’s go.

Note: You have to be on the latest version of Windows 10 Pro (Version 2004) in order to install WSL 2 by the usual methods. If not, you’d need to be part of the Windows Insider Program to have access to …

Jamstack Conf Virtual 2020: Thoughts & Highlights

By Greg Davidson
June 16, 2020

Welcome to Jamstack Conf Virtual 2020

Last week I attended Jamstack Conf Virtual 2020. It had originally been slated to take place in London, UK but was later transformed into a virtual event in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference began at 2pm London time (thankfully I double-checked this the night before!)—​6am for those of us in the Pacific Time Zone.

Up early for #jamstackconf 😎☕️ pic.twitter.com/ydjvrHWCZH

— Greg Davidson (@syncopated) May 27, 2020

Before getting too much further I wanted to mention that if you are not familiar with the Jamstack, You can read more about it at jamstack.org.

To virtually participate in the conference we used an app called Hopin. I had not heard of it before but was impressed with how well it worked. There were over 3000 attendees from 130+ countries one of the times I checked. Phil Hawksworth was the Host/​MC for the event and did a great job. There were virtual spaces for the stage, sessions, expo (vendors), and networking. If you opted to, the networking feature paired you with a random attendee for a video chat. I’m not sure what I expected going into it but I thought it was fun. I met a fellow developer from the Dominican …