Wojtek Naruniec

Top 10 Wolfram Alpha queries for a developer

Productivity

Wolfram Alpha is a computational engine that can provide expert-level knowledge-based answers to questions. I use it to help with everyday work, mainly to perform simple calculations or conversions and for some analysis.

I compiled a list of my top 10 queries in random order:

Timestamp calculations
timestamp for June 1st, 2023, 13:34 UTC
I can quickly get a timestamp for a date in any format or perform other date conversions.

Average of a few numbers
average of {254ms, 419ms, 286ms, 295ms, 289ms} in seconds
It calculates an average of listed numbers and converts milliseconds to seconds. It’s usually quicker than opening a spreadsheet, adding numbers, and writing a formula.

Currency conversions
1700 USD to PLN
I can convert any currency using live rate data.

Basic IP details
check ip 79.110.202.123
I can see basic information for a given IP address.

Date difference calculations
weekdays until June 27th
Calculate how many work days are left before the given date (e.g., deadline).

Details about addresses
state for zipcode 60104
Get a state for a given zip code.

Weight conversions
convert 10lb to kg
I used it a lot when working on e-commerce.

Logical expressions
P && (Q || R)
I can analyze logical expressions and check if they can be simplified.

Colors conversions
rgb 79, 148, 212
It allows converting colors from RGB to hex and many different formats.

Calculate string length
string length “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.”
I can check string length.

Do you use Wolfram Alpha too? Do you know any other helpful queries?

Staging Sites on WordPress.com

WordPress

WordPress.com users have been missing the staging sites feature for years. Here are some quotes I found on the forums:

Does the wp.com business plan offer a staging environment or a recommendation on how to make deployment go smoothly?

julescowan1

How do I set up a staging website?

morganelaine51

I want to work on another theme on a live site. Can I create a staging site to do that in a wordpress.com site?

dlshio

Do any of the WordPress.com plans have staging features? A client of mine has a Business hosting account and I’m trying to understand whether there’s something built in or not. If not, can you suggest options? Thanks in advance

antimofm

As a developer working on my site or a contractor working for a client, I agree, as I used a staging site for most projects I was involved with. The feature can also be helpful for non-developer users, e.g., bloggers or site owners, as they can create a staging site, play with some themes and plugins, experiment with content, and then apply those on the production site if they like the outcome.

I’m happy that it changed this month! Along with my team, we’ve added support for staging sites on WordPress.com, and I had a chance to lead the technical part of the project. Now users on Business and Commerce plans can add one staging site for their production site. The feature is powerful, creating an environment almost like the production environment. 

We still miss the feature allowing users to synchronize data from production to staging or vice versa. Still, at least for one direction, users can use the “cattle not pets” approach and delete the staging site to recreate it fresh based on the production site. 

If you want more details, check out the official staging sites announcement.

Crazy Magento 2 core patches

Magento

Last year I took over a maintenance of the Magento 2 Commerce site. One of first tasks was adjusting the site to meet industry standards as it was a bit messy. The whole content of vendor/ directory was kept in the repository and there were about 30 patch files placed in the site root, without any information which were applied and in which order. Most of them looked as provided by M2 support. I needed to clean this up – to figure out which patches are applied, in which order they are applied and finally find a way allowing me to remove vendor/ from the repository and to be able to apply patches dynamically, during the deployment.

This was a challenging task – I needed to keep comparing the vendor/ contents with the version of this directory coming from clean Magento 2 site, and then keep applying patches until directories were the same. I was able to do this, it proved that about 25 of these patches were really applied.

Recently I wrote a blog post explaining how to deal with the second part of this challenge – check Rocket Web blog to see how to apply Magento 2 core patches.

How I started career thanks to Ultima Online

Gaming

About 13 years ago I was in college and used to play Ultima Online. It’s a fantasy role playing game, actually it’s the first game of massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre (MMORPG). I didn’t play too much on official servers and played mostly on server emulators. They were created by a community who reverse engineered the game and created its own servers.

While playing more I was curious how it all worked so I dug a bit into emulators. I was trying to set up a server using different emulation software, trying to build sceneries and buildings. It was challenging to find online resources which could help in working with emulators. It was a few years before StackExchange was released so I could only get help on bulletin boards or on IRC channels.

At some point I gathered a bunch of Ultima Online materials and spotted a web development tutorial in a computer magazine. As I already tried programming on Amiga a couple years earlier, web development looked encouraging. I tried and soaked into that completely. Soon I created my first website and started sharing my experience and materials with other people who played and mod Ultima Online. I used PHP to run the website and stored site data in text files. I may write more about this some day.

The site was working for the next few years and became popular in the Ultima Online community in Poland. In the meantime I started working on other websites. One of these sites became my first paid web development job, and after some time web development became my main source of income.

Currently the website is offline, but Ultima Online still has active servers which could be played on. In about two weeks, on September 24th it will turn 18 years old!

It looks like it’s worth it to play games, and in general, have a hobby. Gaming led me to a career in web development which actually also became one of my hobbies.

Meet Magento 2014 Poland remarks

Magento, ,

It’s been almost two months since I got back from the Meet Magento Poland 2014 conference. These last two months were really busy for me and a lot of things are still going on. I haven’t got a chance to write about the event yet. I decided to not write a full story, but I’m going to wrap up a random list of notes and thoughts I have gathered after the conference.

My remarks

  • interesting case study of a multi-store and multi-language Magento integration was presented by LPP and Accenture
  • it was hard to switch between Business and Technology tracks and I lost more than half of Kuba Zwoliński presentation about iBeacon. I hope to see videos from the conference sometime soon!
  • there was a nice introduction to Magento 2 caching by Marko Martinović. I was surprised that the Magento 2 Community Edition includes Full Page Cache support
  • good points on contributing to open source Magento extensions and projects in general by Tsvetan Stoychev from Jarlssen. I still need to review extensions published on Jarlssen github
  • I couldn’t watch Damian Luszczymuk’s presentation about Docker as I chose the Flexible Billing talk by our CEO, Matt MacDougall. However I was really lucky and Damian showed me the presentation in brief later that day. I promise to dig into Docker soon.
  • there was an interesting case study on Magento-SAP integration made for Mennica Polska by Robert Żochowski from Bold Agency. I’m excited to buy some gold from a store based on Magento.
  • I got some interesting ideas about introducing developers to Magento development and noted a bunch of training materials from Ben Marks presentation
  • Daniel Sloof made a good overview on HHVM and I’m curious to see Magento 2 running on that engine
  • our booth with space figures and NASA suits was very successful, bringing a lot of people to our place!
  • I missed the presentation about Magento indexers by Maciej Ostrowski and I hope to see the video soon
  • I saw a cool demo of cobby.io, tool which allows me to manage product data in Excel. It sounds like a crazy idea but looks really interesting and works nice
  • community dinner at Podwale 25 restaurant was delicious. I hope to visit that cool place next time I’m in Warsaw
  • enjoyed Thomas Goletz’s story about Gobi desert race and about Chinese Magento branch
  • conference iPhone application was really cool, however iBeacon stuff didn’t work on my iPhone. It’s time to move to the new one

These are just random thoughts I got after the conference. I really liked the event and I hope to go to Meet Magento 2015 later this year :-)

Photo made by Viacheslav Kravchuk, Atwix. Thanks!