Libraries

Spark - An Object Document Mapper (ODM) for Amazon DynamoDB

When I built my writing website for my author alter ego, I wanted to try some new things. For hosting, I decided to leverage serverless technologies on AWS using bref.sh.

For the database I chose DynamoDB, a NoSQL database from Amazon. The only problem was the DynamoDB SDK was clunky to use. I love Doctrine, so I looked around for a similar solution for DynamoDB. I found a few options, but none of them were very good. So, I decided to build my own, and Spark ODM was born.

Docker PHP Dev Environment - With nginx, MySQL and Xdebug

Long ago, I used to struggle setting up a local dev environment. Whether it was to build a website, or whether it was just to test something, I would sometimes spend hours setting up my test environment. Sometimes I used my own Mac as local server, and sometimes I used Vagrant. Then I switched to Docker.

The only trouble was, Docker config wasn't actually as straightforward as advertised. Everyone had a different was of setting up the Dockerfile, docker-compose.yml, and other config files. Further to that, they always seemed to be over complicated.

So I created my own config, with one goal in mind: KISS. I wanted the config files to have only what's absolutely necessary. I wanted them to be small and clean, easy to understand at a glance, and I wanted them to include the very basics a dev needs to get going with PHP.