In my job I’ve noticed that the number of web sites, applications and APIs keep growing and all need servers to run on. I’m not a Systems Administrator but being a lone developer I want to try and keep as much of my time focused on doing what I love, building great apps for people. To help combat the issue of managing multiple servers I started to experiment with Chef and I have to say, after a bit of a learning curve, I like it, or I like what it enables me to be getting on with. Recently, I’ve been tasked with working alongside another developer and the topic of a development environment came...

For anyone running an e-commerce web site, the term PCI compliance is unlikely to escape the owner’s or developers attention. In essence, if a web site is handling credit card data, regardless of whether they store that data, the web site must be PCI compliant. For a web site to be compliant, it must pass a rolling three month test by an authorised PCI scanning vendor. There are many out there and from my experience they are not all equal. Some vary with the features they offer but the interesting one is that not all of them return the same vulnerabilities. As a developer, the vulnerability...

This post is simply a record of the notes I took when I was at WordCamp UK 2011. I know I’ll find it useful and thought that maybe others will as well. And if not, at least my work colleagues should WordCamp Intro VaultPress – Used for realtime backups. Takes snapshots of site. Can rollback to earlier versions of plugins or themes etc. Paid for, $15 per month for basic account. Research WPMU as a strategy for having separate smaller sites instead of one massive site. Definitely helps to improve performance. Look into Gravity forms. A paid for plugin that is supposed to be awesome for...

After reading a post on the IDE used by @skoop as one of the tools he uses in his everyday development, I felt inspired to do the same and hope that others find my individual set up useful to them. The first and most obvious place to start, is that which is at the centre of the universe for a PHP developer, his IDE of choice and at present, that honour goes to PhpStorm. Back in the day when I first started out coding in PHP I used PHPEdit. It was free and built around speed and productivity. I still miss their drop marks feature and surprised other IDEs have not incorporated this into their...

Google the phrase ‘VirtualBox set up’ or similar and you’ll find plenty of guides that will instruct you on the install of a Virtual Machine (VM) with the network adapter set to either NAT or Bridged. While these options work fine, as a web developer you are quick to realise their limitations. So what does a web developer need from their VM networking set up? Simple: To simply and consistently connect to the guest VM from the host, and To connect to the Internet, remote servers and web applications from the guest VM with the same ease as the host. Once a VM has been installed, the...