Notes from the work

If you’ve ever wrote AWS CloudFormation template, you probably know that it can be a daunting task. Luckily, it can be much easier, if you use Python’s library “Troposphere”.

Troposphere lets you create Python objects in place of CloudFormation elements, does some basic validation of your input and generates the JSON template for CloudFormation for you. It is much easier and cleaner to use that writing JSON templates manually.

The following eval’ed code was caused a lot of misunderstanding: https://eval.in/61309. The code looks like this:

1$a = "2a0";
2
3for($i = 0; $i < 50; $i++) {
4    print "$a\n";
5    $a++;
6}

I’ve been recently working on a project that uses Node.js with cluster module and socket.io and I noticed that a lot of people that try to use Node.js with socket.io have problems with how to make it work with cluster module.

Recently, I’ve joined a project that required accessing Gmail accounts using oAuth authentication with PHP. It turns out, that’s not such a very simple thing to do, especially with PHP - Zend has a very nice implementation for it, but the wiki page is terribly old and outdated… I’ve lost a few hours looking for a nice and clean solution and found a “handmadeimap” project done by Pete Warder some time ago. Bad thing is, the latest commit was done in 2010. The good thing: not much has changed since then, so the code works perfectly. It’s even better to use that php-imap extension, as you need to use raw IMAP commands, which gives you the chance to use, for example, gmail’s special X-GM-RAW extension to SEARCH command.