Old PHP, and where does the Moon rise? - weeknotes #57

Dealing with ageing bespoke-built content: never fun. I hope that the tools we use today (static-files generation, lockfiles, containerisation, etc.) will make that job easier in the long run.

Even so, tools churn will remain a factor. This week, I looked at an old interactive web campaign, commissioned by Global Witness and built by capable people, in a mix of techs commonly referred to as a LAMP stack and updated a couple of years ago into a Docker orchestration.

Now, I personally am not very capable in SQL, and would certainly not accept money to do PHP professionally.

There’s always guesswork and learning, I guess, but somehow I ended up stumbling upon a custom Levenshtein algorithm implementation which I can only assume aims to help with the non-English nature of the material…

But that’s where I pack it up and wash my hands with it.

So what to do? Commission someone to build the whole thing again?

At this point, consultancies and freelancers should sell subscriptions, not one-offs.

Spent an afternoon at the Onion Space, which is slowly but surely coming back life (I wouldn’t know, though).

Did a bit more Clojure/ClojureScript with Niko for the Deutsche Welle. The project, a tool that facilitates disinformation awareness trainings, is coming to an end insofar as a v1.0 is concerned.

I am thinking about moving these notes to a monthly format, in an attempt to focus them slightly differently. The weekly log is kind of nice as The Work Week is still a significant time period, but I wonder what would the expectations of a longer term be?

Giuseppe formats his this way…