Martin Brennan Page 5 of 11 for Martin Brennan | I’m Martin Brennan, and I’m a full stack staff software engineer based in Australia, currently working for Discourse. I primarily enjoy working with Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript, with a focus on product engineering. I’m always seeking ways to expand my knowledge and learn about new tools, languages and frameworks.

Martin Brennan

  • Changes to NPM’s unpublish policy

    |

    Today (March 30th 2016) NPM has made some important changes to their unpublish policy to avoid issues like the ones arising from the left-pad and kik unpublishing. You can read about the new policy here:

    http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141905368000/changes-to-npms-unpublish-policy

    These changes are clearly a step in the right direction and should prevent an individual from breaking the entire NPM ecosystem by removing a package that is depended on by many others.

    Read more...

  • I’m back

    |

    Unbeknownst to me my site was down for 7 days with the message “Error establishing a database connection.”. This occurs when the mysql service crashes on the server. I currently have no way to get notified of this, so any tips on how to do so on a DigitalOcean droplet would be great! The command used to get the mysql service up and running again is:

    Plaintext 
    

    1

    		

    sudo service mysql restart

  • A review

    |

    Over the next week or so I’m going to be blowing out the cobwebs of this blog so to speak, in a review, because I’ve been neglecting it quite a bit and I want it to be a better platform for my tech writing. I’m aiming to:

    • Rewrite the theme (again) for an easier to read and navigate blog, including the return of syntax highlighting. I’d previously converted about half of my code samples to use gists but I am going to go back to using a syntax highlighter (probably prism or highlight.js) to reduce load.
    • Go through old posts and put disclaimers on those that are old and probably no longer valid, or have misleading information. I may just implement a flag for posts to display this warning so  I don’t have to do it manually.
    • Speed up the performance of my site. If anyone has any tips on speeding up WordPress I’m all ears, I’ve tried to do a lot of things but they don’t seem to work for long. I may end up upgrading to a larger digitalocean droplet.

    Apart from that, I aim to come up with more articles more frequently, a lot about JavaScript since that is what I’m primarily working with now. Thanks for reading, the changes will be coming soon.

5 / 11