I had to work on a project that made heavy use of MySQL routines: stored procedures, views, functions and triggers. In the process of adding Laravel to the application, I found good packages to seed the database from existing data, create models from the existing schema and create migrations from existing tables.
Recently, I was looking for a way to deploy a Laravel application with ease and no headache. After some time, I wrote a very basic Bash script to automate the common deployment tasks: pulling changes from Git, installing Composer dependencies, building NPM scripts, running migrations and so on. But it was still feeling primitive. There had to be a better way.
As part of my Software Verification and Testing class at Concordia University, my team and I chose to study empirically the performance of some popular Laravel applications. The goal was to replicate the paper “How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild” by Junwen Yang et al.
Recently, I had to counter a layer 7 HTTP Flood DDoS attack on my server, that is using CloudFlare. I started by setting up Fail2Ban using the Nginx logs, and Fail2Ban would ban attackers but they would still be able to hit my server. I finally understood that since they were passing through CloudFlare, I had to block them at a higher level, CloudFlare itself. Fortunately, CloudFlare offers a firewall and an API to block offenders.
Thus, the solution I found is to analyze Nginx’s logs with Fail2Ban, and trigger a ban once a certain threshold is met. We will ban the user from the server but also from accessing CloudFlare using their REST API.
We all listen to music on our smartphones. Since I’m old-fashioned, I still have a local library and no Spotify subscription. I’ve been using the Phonograph music player for a few years but after having see its development stopped for a few months, its creator decided to put some of its best features behind a paywall. For instance, it was not longer possible to browse files to play a music.