In March 2018, Facebook began automatically rewriting links to use HTTPS using the HSTS preload list. Now all Wikimedia sites (including Wikipedia) do the same.
If you're not familiar with it, the HSTS preload list tells browsers (and other clients) that the website should only be visited over HTTPS, not …
A while back, a friend mentioned to me that you could send potatoes through the mail. I was pretty skeptical at the time, but basic Internet research confirmed what they told me.
So a little bit later I had the opportunity to send them something, and decided to test it …
The Symfony project has recently created a set of pure-PHP polyfills for both PHP extensions and newer language features. It allows developers to add requirements upon those functions or language additions without increasing the system requirements upon end users. For the most part, I think this is a good thing …
Following the MediaWiki 1.31.1 security release, I was finally able to update the Debian package to 1.31 LTS in preparation for the Debian Buster release.
Last week's security release of MediaWiki 1.27.5 / 1.29.3 / 1.30.1 / 1.31.1 mentioned a small hint of a new release script being used for this release. Chad came up with the concept/architecture of the new script, I wrote most of the code, and …
I've been using the JetBrains IDE PHPStorm ever since I really got started in MediaWiki development in 2013. Its symbol analysis and autocomplete is fantastic, and the built-in inspections generally caught most coding issues while you were still writing the code.
But, it's also non-free software, which has always made …