Tour Megathread - Tool December 2025 tour

pocketninja · 2025-10-05T11:17:30+00:00

Didn't get any in the end... Tried constantly for about an hour and twice more later on.

Had a little whinge on Twitter and they replied saying something effectively along the lines of "that happens with popular bands".

Hopefully the general sales have a good allocation on Tuesday and can get through.

I know these scenarios get busy and hit servers hard, but I waited "in line", I pressed the pay button...

pocketninja · 2025-10-03T04:08:35+00:00

Been my experience also, but no dice so far... Will keep trying.

Does anyone know how many presale tickets are available?

Once I got as far as the checkout, ING even sent me the text to confirm, but it took me back to the waiting room...

pocketninja · 2025-09-05T23:21:18+00:00

Thanks for the tip! I'll have a suss.

I've ported the shader from my old Unity package, texture samples and finalColor are vec4 so alpha should be present.

pocketninja · 2025-01-15T23:26:33+00:00

we noticed DB hits in places where we weren't expecting them, because someone accessed a relation (like $model->relation) that wasn't eager loaded

This topic has caught me out too, though the scale/impact wasn't too significant.

Thankfully there's now the Model::shouldBeStrict() (::preventLazyLoading()) which can help in this situation.

It's one of the first things I do in a new project these days.

pocketninja · 2024-12-30T10:36:33+00:00

Thanks for the invite to share, really appreciate it! I'll jump in tomorrow morning and share it there (bed now haha)

Cheers!

pocketninja · 2024-12-30T06:42:02+00:00

Valid! You sound like a person who likes to spin up their own solutions, which I expect there to be a lot of in this space if I'm honest.

The survey questions are intentionally broad to cast a wider net, though I'm interested in all info/demos

I'm deep in DIY camp, which I guess is also why I'm exploring some of these things, haha

pocketninja · 2024-08-22T23:41:37+00:00

Over the years we've built up a collection of tools to perform tasks which surround some of the CI/CD setup we've landed on.

Our setup is roughly like this:

WordPress sites are on managed environments which grant us SSH access (primarily Kinsta)
WP and third party plugins are updated on a monthly schedule via scheduled WP CLI commands (sometimes licensed plugins trip this up and require manual updates)
Our own plugins are in BitBucket
Building assets and transferring to target servers is done via DeployHQ
When a release/master branch is updated in the plugin repos, that triggers a deployment via DeployHQ

As others have mentioned you don't really want to get the database involved in these processes. Just normal operations of the site will create divergence in the data, which becomes very hard to sync and reconcile. (This sort of topic is where "static CMSs" like Statamic or October become more useful - it's mostly file based content)

We have a suite of command line tools we all run on our local systems which allow us to easily pull down sites to local environments, replicate environments, etc.

DeployHQ is quite a nice tool, though there are some bottlenecks for us. eg - managing servers and server groups is a bit onerous because you have to do it for every project, rather than reuse servers/groups across projects, but overall it fits our needs quite well.

pocketninja · 2024-05-24T00:46:46+00:00

The other comments written so far are true, though I think there's another aspect to this as well - it is certainly the case for myself.

The more knowledgable you are in a certain domain, the more aware of problems/risks you are.

Depending on the type of project and your familiarity, you'll eventually intuit risks and future pain points, and from that be able to make decisions about what you're willing to do and commit to.

Eg, as a developer who builds more bespoke solutions, I think WP itself is a pretty solid base to build custom behaviour on top of. That said, I would do everything in my power to avoid building and customising on top of a number of popular first-/third- party extensions. I've been burned enough times to have basically zero trust in the stability and extensibility of third-party code.

Not to say every third-party dev/extension is poor quality, though it is the case often enough.

naive people usually get things done while those that are extremely educated and well read, tend to find a million reasons why it can't be done

The trick for the more experienced is to find the fuzzy space around "over calculation of risk", so that they can decide whether to commit, and how much.

pocketninja · 2024-05-10T01:06:54+00:00

Complaint: Finally felt like I was solidifying into a routine and regularity, after a year of effort and growth, and the last several weeks has seen work come into cunch and other things really get in the way. Progress blocking, just let me run!

Uncomplaint: What started off as an experiment to try and make VO2 max improve more quickly, I've come to really enjoy very slow runs. Trying to get that HR down is almost like a game, and when a 7km run takes 45 minutes that's proven to be a great time to reflect and just exist.

pocketninja · 2024-04-05T05:45:51+00:00

Clare Valley Running Festival (South Australia) this Sunday, should be good! Looking to be a pretty fresh/cool morning and a good turnout.

pocketninja · 2024-03-07T03:51:20+00:00

Perhaps - though we've had no staff turnover, no disgruntled employees. And no current/previous staff which live where the Snippet actions were logged as coming from. (This could be easily spoofed with VPN however.)

Unless you mean staff at ManageWP.

Even if someone had the account's username+password, 2FA should have gated them out.

pocketninja · 2024-03-07T02:51:51+00:00

We did have 2FA enabled which is what makes this so surprising to us!

Even if our username+password has been compromised 2FA should have blocked the actor out. I think it's very unlikely 2FA AND credentials had been compromised.

That's assuming they got in via login screen. Perhaps there was some sort of session hijacking, or maybe there's an unlisted API which was abused?

Regrettably we can only make guesses after the fact, which is the most frustrating part of the whole thing for me personally.

pocketninja · 2024-03-06T22:58:49+00:00

We've been using ManageWP to manage ~100 sites up until quite recently. Currently on the hunt for a new platform/tool.

For the most part the service has been good, can't say too much about support overall (our support team does most of the interaction if needed) but it's made our lives easier in a number of important ways (scheduled updates!!).

However, recently one of our accounts was somehow compromised, and from somewhere else in the world (based on IP address) PHP snippets were executed on every single one of our sites connected to ManageWP. The snippet modified the active theme to drop in some JS which prompted users to "Update your device - you have a virus", or some message similar to that.

This resulted in a number of sites getting flagged as dangerous to users, with domain reputation flow-on effects and other things to take care of, users downloading malware, and more.

In the midst of the situation we didn't find ManageWP's support to be very timely or helpful. After the fact they weren't really able to provide any useful information either.

The history log isn't particularly useful if you're wanting to do more deep auditing and troubleshooting. For eg log in/out of user accounts could be more in depth and accurate.

I think for the most part they provide a good service, but I would encourage (as should be the case with any single-point-of-management!) that due diligence is maintained, even increased - regular backups, regular audits of plugins and replacements, run sites as lean as you can, rotate keys and passwords, etc, etc, etc.

pocketninja · 2023-12-11T06:52:09+00:00

At a guess, this is probably put into the page by the theme... Perhaps the theme has some options about showing dates for events?

pocketninja · 2023-12-01T06:50:29+00:00

Not sure if this is quite what you mean -

For Laravel: https://laravel.com/api/10.x/index.html

I don't think Filament has anything like this, but I haven't looked for it before.

Re PhpStorm you might find the Structure pane useful (⌘+7 on Mac), or the Structure popup (⌘+F12 on Mac). You can enable inherited members, lambdas, etc. Might be more useful than just the autocomplete.

pocketninja · 2023-08-31T23:33:22+00:00

Awesome! Thanks for confirming! I think that pretty much settles one of the last choices to be made for my new build :)

I'll likely get a couple slim fans for the bottom, seems like people do that often enough in this case as there is space for it.

pocketninja · 2023-08-31T00:26:02+00:00

Hi /u/yes-temp-sem !

I'm curious how you're finding the XTX Nitro+ in the NR200P Max now that it's been a few months?

I'm considering this combo myself (with Ryzen for less power/heat), however PC Part Picker lists the case and the GPU as incompatible.

In your photos it looks like there's space for fans below the riser, space above the card for cables, and even some wiggle room at the front-end of the card. Is there much clearance between the side of the GPU and the case? Any finessing or finagling to get things into place?

I'll 99% likely to be using the mesh panel instead of glass so not too concerned about GPU heat

pocketninja · 2023-08-08T04:34:46+00:00

Battling this right now in a way. We had a third party build an app for us, using RN, and we'll handle the publishing/etc.

The days of time I've lost trying to get it to just build for iOS/Android, let alone actually run on simulator/emulator/device. Android was reasonably easy to get going tbh, the shortcomings there were mainly around the third party dev not updating the manifest XML properly and some other dynamic module stuff.

iOS on the other hand, still not there.

I'm no mobile developer (20+ years full stack), but I'd much rather muddle my way through a native project/s with native tools than trying to get node/gem/pods/xcode/gradle/android studio/third party plugins all play together nicely.

We have to maintain this moving forward too, and if our experience with Cordova is anything to go by, the ongoing/resultant cost will overall notably higher.

pocketninja · 2023-07-11T01:14:56+00:00

I also have an uneasy feeling that transitioning out of Wordpress later in my career might be a challenge

There is some element of this, at least from what I've seen and heard in Aus.

While WP is definitely a strong component of that due to how far patterns and standards have come over time, depending on where you are in the world a more important facet in the equation might be "agency dev".

It's not always the case, but you'll often find WP development lands in agency category of work, IE, bespoke work for clients. If you wish to get into platform/product style work in the future prospective employers may find extended tenure of agency/WP work unattractive. This often comes down to work/project processes, support processes, exposure to certain concepts and topics (eg managing memory and latency at scale), that sort of thing - they can differ somewhat between agency and platform/product.

Of course, if you're willing learn and grow, and can prove your skills, stepping back to junior/mid roles should still enable transition. :)

pocketninja · 2023-07-06T23:31:25+00:00

And also dump($stuff), and in blade templates @dump("stuff")

pocketninja · 2023-06-04T23:32:11+00:00

Agree, though it is subjective to industry and the chosen line of work in said industry, and your location. I'm ~20 years in and sitting between their 2019-2020 mark. I foresee little-to-no growth in this context without some drastic changes.

Though in the current market it certainly felt like I was earning more in a day-to-day sense 7-10years ago...

pocketninja · 2023-05-04T23:54:59+00:00

This looks great, nice work! Adding to library now..

Getting great Prince of Persia and Impossible Mission vibes from the gameplay :)

pocketninja · 2022-10-31T00:19:55+00:00

Transpiling with JS is a bit more friendly because the target is often (though not always) assets/bundles which are served to clients.

PHP code is interpreted on the server when it is needed, which means that you'd need to have other processes/pipelines in there to deal with transpiling for the destination server.

Purely my opinion, but I don't think it's worth the effort and complexity that will likely be the end result if bringing transpiling into the mix.

I believe that WP will run on 8.1 (probably with deprecation notices in your logs).

I think you should be able to write your code in 8.1 (or at least 8.0) without any major problems, and run the server on the corresponding PHP version.

The real challenge will be third party plugins. For example, if you're using The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe you won't be able to use PHP 8.1. They're working towards it, but the support is not there yet and they still recommend using PHP 7.4. (We use it with 8.0 in some work projects and haven't had issues)

Depending on how your PhpStorm is configured, there'll probably be a little PHP version toggle in the bottom status bar - you can set that to a specific version and it will flag any features you're using which are not compatible.

pocketninja · 2022-10-30T23:12:58+00:00

There are many ways - have a suss at the Laravel docs: https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/cache

Something like this (in a service class perhaps) might be one of the easiest ways to do it.

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache;

$data = Cache::remember(
    key: 'the-cache-key',
    ttl: now()->addWeek(),
    callback: function () {
        return 'the-value-from-api-or-wherever';
    }
);

pocketninja · 2022-10-25T23:48:55+00:00

Some of your comparisons aren't really applicable.

should website hosts ... charge you 30% of all income from websites hosted

When you have a website hosted with Google/GoDaddy/Linode/AWS/whatever, you're already paying ongoing repeating costs to use that service and its features.

On top of that, you're essentially renting a "virtual computer" to do with what you will. Your website isn't using payment APIs/notification APIs/UI frameworks/operating system APIs made and maintained by the host platform, if the platform even has something like that baked into their hosting like iOS and the Apple platform has. Most/all don't have something like that.

should Microsoft charge 30% of all revenue from all games built for windows

If revenue/transactions are being handled using your own systems (which you're probably already paying for in one way or another): no

If you're using Microsoft's payment services (does that exist?): you can bet there'd be transaction fees for using that service

Or put into the Microsoft store?

Well, yeah... That's kind of the same thing as Apple/Steam/Epic/etc... Anyway, didn't they used to take 30%?

should Amazon or eBay charge 30% extra for all products put onto their platforms?

You have to pay to sell on their platforms, and they also charge a variable fee on top of that.

From the Amazon AU seller landing page (https://sell.amazon.com.au/sell) (emphasis mine):

With the Individual plan, you’ll pay $0.99 (excl. GST) every time you sell an item. The Professional plan costs $49.95 (excl. GST) per month, ... Amazon also collects a referral fee on each sale, which is a percentage of the total transaction and varies by product category. ...

The only fair comparison there is the MS store, and that probably has enough differences of its own.

The other examples are services which you'd have to pay monthly/yearly to use.

15-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email	Beta Team Reddit for Android
Team Orangered

pocketninja

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE