CategoryUncategorised

Reverting “Coming Soon” page from CPanel Website Builder

October 18, 2023 /

This is an issue I got recently that might make some people scratch their heads.

I was browsing the stuff from my Namecheap hosting’s CPanel interface, and accidentally used the “Website Builder” option on my main domain (www.fdrobidoux.com).

This created a Coming Soon page on the index.

I didn’t ask for this. So I fixed it.

The Solution :

  • Go into the folder on your server where your WordPress installation resides.
  • Delete the index.php file.
  • Rename the spb_index.php file to index.php.
  • Done!

Needless to say, I won’t be using that feature again in the future!

PSA: Stop using Streams and Reader/Writers to Convert Strings/ByteArrays

July 28, 2021 /

Stop doing this :

using (var memory = new MemoryStream())
{
    using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(memory, Encoding.ASCII))
    {
        foreach (var lineData in dataLines)
        {
            writer.WriteLine(lineData);
        }
        
        writer.Flush();
        return memory.GetBuffer();
    }
}

Just… do this instead.

return Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(lineData.Join("\n\r"));

Trust me, it’s not worth using streams unless you explicitly need to.

Using “Emojis” when naming Pull-Requests

March 9, 2020 /

Today, I started my new job at JStratégia as a mobile developer. For the first 4 hours, I worked on setting up my brand new Lenovo Thinkpad, (never had one, they’re sweeeeet !) getting my emails set up on both mobile and on the laptop, meeting the team…

And then I was explained for the remaining 2 hours how the neighboring team worked for the past 6 months, and it was a mindblowing experience.

One of the biggest revelations I had out of the many great practices they had within their git workflow, was to use emojis at the beginning of the title of the pull request. This might sound odd at first, but here’s some examples :

If it’s a feature, name it, for example :
? Mobile : Responsiveness to sales view

If it’s a bugfix, use this :
? Apache : Access to root from a regex pasted in url

For adding tests :
☑ Setup : Compat. Linux, Mac OS, Windows and Solaris

In case you’re upgrading a library the project depends on, or adding new ones :
? NPM : leftpad 2.0.2 to 2.1.4

When it involves the documentation :
? Deployment : Extra troubleshooting

This has multiple advantages :

1. It’s fun

Well, duh. Emojis are fun. ?

2. It’s easier to give a meaningful, but descriptive title.

You can waste a lot of time trying to conjugate your sentences in a coherent manner, but here you’ll keep it short and sweet.

3. It’ll give quick-scan skills to reviewers

You won’t feel guilty of writing “Fixed deployment bugs” and fear that any extra details will be glossed over if you add anything more, but reducing on details won’t help either. Plus, there is now a clear distinction between category, sub-category and description.

4. You can count ’em !

When you’ll be making a post-mortem, you’ll be able to easily count emojis by making a search for them and counting the results for every time they come up. This means you can count how many times bugs, features, documentation and testing were worked on, and compare with past projects to get a feel of what’s been prioritized the most.

So, what do you folks do at work to improve your git workflow ? I’d love to know !

This simple LinkedIn Hack could help you reapply to past job offers

September 27, 2019 /

While cleaning up my LinkedIn connections from ones I don’t interact with anymore, I noticed something that happened quite a few times more than I expected.

When you remove someone from your contacts, they get a notification that you saw their profile. This can be both a curse and a blessing.

When they check out your profile, they might remember you because they don’t go too much on LinkedIn and still remember you, and wonder why you removed them and be confused as to why you’d remove them. That’s the curse.

But what about…

When It’s A Blessing

A lot of the people who use LinkedIn do so in order to either get a new job or to recruit new employees to their job. The latter, you might already know, are called Head Hunters.

Contrairy to what’s divulged by their title coming straight from a post-apocalyptic novel, all they want is to find the best person to join their company. (and they hope it’ll be you !)

When you lack options because all the jobs you find are senior-level and you’ve freshly-graduated, a headhunter is your best pal on this battlefield that is the job market. They’re your friends. Ok, not that close, but you can often trust them to help you.

Years pass, and after connecting with so many of them, they often will forget about you. There really isn’t a nice, convenient way to say “Hey, look at me, I have lots of experience now, I’m qualified !” without sounding like an ass. Until…

A Second Chance

They look back at your profile. And to do that, you look at theirs. And if they’re interested by the skills you acquired since they last pinged you, they’ll want you to tell them you’re interested in an offer.

But sometimes, you need to validate that they want to see if you’d be a fit for their employer.

That’s why you have to remove them as connection on LinkedIn. If they add you back, you know it’s ok to message them. Conscent is given clearly that way. From that point on, it becomes easier to re-initiate a dialogue.

It might not work for everyone, but this became a revelation when it personally happened to me a couple times over the past week while cleaning up my connections. Some of them even replied back to me ! Hopefully, it helps you too.

Cheers !