Blog - Page 2 of 2 - Niels van der Molen

Politics

A realistic plan to pay for a universal basic income in the Netherlands

Een Nederlandse versie kan je hier vinden The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) is gaining traction on the whole political sphere. The central concept is that every citizen gets a monthly allowance that is above the poverty line with no mandatory requirements (e.g., having to apply for a job). Even if you do have a salary, you would still get the monthly UBI on top of it. As the concept is assuming a Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, 9 months8 months ago

Challenge

No content consumption for a month challenge

I am never bored, and I am an expert at spending leisure time. When there are 100 people in the room I am less conscientious than 82 of them (understandmyself.com). I would not be one of the victims when the world’s economy is fully automated and taken over by robots because I will have no problem finding enough activities for me to spend my time on. For example, in the last two weeks, I spend Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, 9 months ago

Introduction

First month of the blog, 500 visitors!

This article gives an overview of how the first month of the blog went with insight in statistics from behind the scenes. It is mainly interested for people that read this blog or that are thinking of starting their blog. Data & statistics Post & page visits (what people viewed): Referrers (where people come from): Countries: Clicks (from the posts): Monthly views and visitors: I am quite happy with the visitors in the first month. Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, 10 months10 months ago

Symfony

How to create custom actions for the Symfony 4 EasyAdminBundle

I am working on an API application that automates the deployments to a Docker Swarm cluster which inspired the this article. The application is using a combination of the API Platform and the EasyAdminBundle, which are the opinionated choices of the Symfony community for the Symfony Flex recipes of “api” and “admin”. One trick that is helpful to know is how to create custom actions in the admin overviews. The final system should automate the Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, 10 months ago

Music

Songs from Nick Cave you should listen to

When I was a kid and developed a taste for music, I was exposed to the music of my father. For the younger generation, in my youth, we did not have YouTube or Spotify, so we were limited to the music your parents bought (or later downloaded). When we went on holiday, we only had music in the form of the cassette player and then CD’s in the car (my dad does not enjoy listening Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, 10 months10 months ago

Jenkins

A continuous integration pipeline with Jenkins in Docker

This article should be useful for people that want to build their continuous integration system with Jenkins or those who are evaluating the option. We show in an example of a Jenkinsfile where we build a Symfony application with Composer, execute PHPUnit tests and how we pushed the Docker images to a custom repository. Furthermore, we show how we execute the pipeline on a Docker Swarm cluster with a custom Jenkins agent. The reason for Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, 10 months10 months ago

API

How to build a Symfony 4 API Platform application from scratch

Symfony 4 and the API Platform Framework make it easy to create an API application with basic CRUD operations. However, in real-world applications more advanced features (e.g. authentication and custom endpoints) are needed which require quite a bit of knowledge to set-up. Therefore, in this blog article, we explore these advanced features by creating an example application that covers the following topics: Step 1. Installation of API Platform and the EasyAdminBundle Step 2. Creation of Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, 10 months8 months ago

Docker

Why and how you should use Docker with Symfony 4

Symfony 4 made a deliberate choice to create new features to support microservices. Symfony Flex and Recipes make it easy to create a project that holds the minimal of dependencies, for example, the Twig (layout) component is not loaded when creating a minimal API application: 12composer create-project symfony/skeleton my-project composer req api This makes Symfony 4 a good choice for setting up our microservices especially in combination with the reduced complexity of bundle-less applications and sensible Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, 11 months11 months ago

Introduction

What to expect of this blog?

This blog is written mainly to have a reason to do research and to document the progress in the hope it will be useful for the audience. I expect to benefit from this blog by getting in touch with like-minded people and receiving feedback about the topics. My background is in computer science and engineering with an MSc in Human Media Interaction and with four-year experience as a Drupal developer with experience in enterprise solution architecture for Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, 11 months ago