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Remote Work, Actually Works!

As a fully remote company, the Cake Development Corporation team is used to working from home. We communicate with our team daily, keep on top of tasks, hold each other accountable and support one another. Heck, a lot of us even do it with kids in the household, too! I consider us extremely lucky to be able to work while juggling an at home life at the same time.  It has worked for CakeDC over the past decade, and in my opinion, can work for most companies. 

 As of last month, an estimated 4.7 million people were working remotely, which grew 44% over the last 5 years. This is just in the United States. Remote work is becoming the norm.  Obviously for the next few weeks, this number will be drastically increased, but perhaps this will educate companies on the advantages of a WFH culture. Advantages to employers, besides the operations cost (other than payroll, of course), which can decrease by close to 90%, includes increased productivity. Decreased overhead results in higher salaries, which results in more quality candidates and employees.  I understand the concern of the ability to micro-manage (UGH) being unavailable, but according to statistics, 85% of businesses that work remotely confirmed that productivity increased in their companies. When there is more flexibility, there will be higher employee morale. 

With the current situation arising from COVID-19, a lot of businesses are forced to transition employees to WFH in order to stay afloat. This not only keeps employees and clients safe, but family members too.  I have put together some stats and resources that may help CEO’s and employees transition a little bit easier.

 

Communication:

It is absolutely essential to keep open communication among a team when everyone is working remotely. Our team uses RocketChat* ( I will include some links in the resource section at the end of this blog), and it has proved to be effective. A chat allows for quicker response time, as well as allowing individuals to set their status (like busy, away, at lunch, sick, etc.). This is a good way to get quick answers, as users can be alerted when they have been messaged or tagged in a company chat. Most of our team work in different timezones, so this is a good way to “stay in the know” about everything happening day to day. We separate chats according to their department. For example: marketing, development, general, etc. We also have the option to private message with co-workers when needed. 

Other ideas, if not daily chat interaction, include scheduled meetings. For most of our team meetings, we use Zoom. This tool allows for audio only, as well as video chats.

 

Accountability & Time Management:

It is important that tasks are managed and followed through. We use programs like Redmine* to track hours and work, in addition to weekly, or monthly conference calls for each department. 

If you or your team are new to remote work, it may be in your best interest to assign a project manager, someone who will assign work, track hours, and ensure that work needed is being completed in a timely manner. Without each person being held accountable, the ship will sink, fast. For personal accountability, there are many free apps and tools available. One example is Trello*. This is a scheduling board so that tasks are not forgotten and you can plan your work week and stay organized. Once tasks placed on your “schedule board” are completed, you can make note of it and stay focused on each one according to their priority. You can also keep track of documents and reports. The boards look like this:

 

 

Resources:

Documents & Recording -

We <3 Google Docs - we are able to share and edit internally, we couldn’t function without it. 

Docusign is a good tool for contracts / documents needing signatures

Invision Freehand - this is a tool where you can create presentations, and allows comments and feedback between designers. Good for freelance designers! 

 

Organization/Tasks - 

Trello - for individual time management scheduling. 

Redmine - for project assigning, time recording, HR management, 

 

Communication - 

RocketChat - allows for multiple internal chats all rolled into one link (allows for individual logins)

Zoom - good for meetings. Allows audio and video chats for teams or reps and clients. 

Slack - also a great option for expanded chats. Each person has a “screen name” and can be personally messaged, or public groups can be created (we use this as well). Slack also allows video calls with their paid subscription. 

Google Hangouts

WhatsApp - if your team is diverse, like ours, WhatsApp is a must. We are able to text each other, regardless of location - no fees, no service problems (if you have wifi of course). 

World Time Buddy - this is a tool that I am not familiar with, but being the designated “scheduler of meetings”, I think I would find it useful. If your team works within different timezones, this allows you to add the location of your teammates, compare times, and find ideal times for meetings. 

 

Community -

In the development world, community support sites are absolutely one of the most important tools. This allows for individuals - inside or outside of your company - to communicate and help each other out. Most developers are aware and utilize these, but if not, may I suggest:

Discourse - chat support 

GitHub - our favorite team collaboration tool. GitHub allows for hosting, editing and managing products. We use it for building software and allow for community interaction. It also integrates with a lot of other tools, which is a plus!

 

Take Away:

These resources are just a drop in the bucket compared to what is available to remote workers. I think this is a reflection of how WFH is becoming more accepted and more normal in the corporate world. I’d love to hear some of your favorites: [email protected]

Let’s take away some positivity to the current quarantined times, and encourage more companies to follow suit. In today’s world, flexibility goes a long way and this type of transition can be mutually beneficial for employers and employees. I mean look at us, we are PRETTY normal… right? 

Speaking of being in quarantine - stay healthy, stay inside, and wash your hands!

 

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A quick CakePHP Local environment with DDEV

In the realm of web development, a seamless local environment is the bedrock for efficient and stress-free coding. Enter DDEV, a powerful tool that simplifies the setup process and empowers developers to dive into their projects with ease. In this blog post, we'll embark on a journey to demystify the process of setting up a local development environment using DDEV. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting in the world of web development, optimizing your local environment can significantly enhance your workflow.

Pre Conditions :

Install Docker https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/ and install DDEV https://ddev.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Step 1: Create a new CakePHP project skeleton 

composer create-project cakephp/app myproject A new folder "myproject" will be created with a CakePHP project skeleton inside. Go to this new directory and proceed with the following instructions.

Step 2: Initial ddev setup

Run ddev config
This will do the initial ddev setup, press enter for all questions.  Run ddev auth ssh
This will add ssh key authentication to the ddev-ssh-auth container

Step 3: Adjust the settings

Inside "myproject" a new .ddev folder will be created, open config.yaml  and adjust there: php version, database and the database url environment.  For PHP:
php_version: "8.1"

For the database: database: type: mysql version: "8.0" For the environment variable: web_environment: - DATABASE_URL=mysql://db:db@db/db

Step 4: Start ddev

ddev start  This will spin up the project.

Step 5: Open your application

ddev launch This will open your project in a browser.   Once you have the application up and running, some useful commands you could run are:
  • ddev composer to execure composer
  • ddev mysql to get into the database
  • ddev ssh takes you into the web container.
In this link https://ddev.readthedocs.io/en/latest/users/usage/cli/ you can see more useful commands.   Hope you enjoy playing with DDEV!

 

   

 

 

CakeFest 2023 Recap

CakeFest 2023 once again brought together developers from around the world for a weekend of baking (code), insightful talks, and community building. This year's event, featuring speakers from eight different countries and attendees joining both in person and via live streaming, was a refreshing convergence of passion and technology.

International Flavor:

One of the highlights of CakeFest 2023 was its international reach. Speakers from the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Brazil, and Spain graced the virtual and physical stages, sharing experiences in the world of CakePHP and software development. This lineup added a diverse perspective to the event's discussions.  

A Weekend of Learning and Networking:

CakeFest attendees enjoyed a weekend filled with learning opportunities, covering things from beginner workshops to cutting-edge software development trends, to the future of CakePHP. Workshops, panels, and presentations provided valuable insights and knowledge of the framework. We hope that everyone had the chance to expand their skills, connect with other developers, and forge new professional relationships. When CakeFest wasn't in session, the core/CakePHP team and attendees spent a lot of time getting to know each other… Groups went to lunch and dinner every day of the event. This is probably my favorite part of the physical conferences.    

Baking and Code:

Day 1 consisted of 2 full workshops from Jorge González and lead core developer Mark Story. The third workshop presented by Kevin Pfeifer was included in day 2’s hybrid model. Followed by talks from: John Killcommons (keynote) of Zulucare/Zulucloud, Rafael Queiroz (Github actions for beginners and applied to CakePHP basic projects), Celso Fontes (PGE Digital, a successful CakePHP project in Rio de Janeiro's Attorney), and Andres Campanario (Integration of inertiajs on CakePHP to bake CRUD SPA).    Day 3’s speakers included: Remy Bertot (keynote) of Passbolt, Mark Scherer  (How to use your IDE effectively for CakePHP), Alejandro Ibarra (Unveiling the Ultimate Showdown: A Comparative Analysis of Local Development Tools), Stefan Koopmanschap (Domain-Driven Design: The Basics), Umer Salman (Agile Deployment of CakePHP Web Applications in a Hybrid Kubernetes Cluster), and Wim Godden (Websockets as the glue to interactivity).    It was a weekend worth remembering for sure. The unique blend of networking and code at CakeFest allowed attendees to see just how far CakePHP has come, and will go, plus some pretty cool things built with the framework.     

The Cake Ceremony:

No CakeFest would be complete without the much-anticipated cake ceremony. We hope that those attending virtually were able to enjoy some with us. In LA, we carried on the tradition of allowing Mark Story to be the “cutter of the cake”. Now that I think about it, he never asks to cut the cake, but it’s a honor nonetheless. 

   

Conclusion:

CakeFest 2023 was a celebration of passion, knowledge, and creativity. With its global reach, experienced speaker lineup, and faithful community, we believe that the event left attendees inspired and eager to continue their works using Cake. We also learned about all of the cool places that CakePHP is being utilized, from the attorney general's office in Brazil, all the way to nasa using some CakePHP in space (more or less). We also heard from some of our CakePHP core developers - specifically their thoughts on CakePHP 5 and what’s to come. You can see a lot of photos on Facebook and Twitter and the edited presentation videos will be posted to YouTube soon. We are working on getting slides uploaded into the CakeFest site as we speak (or type).    Someone said to me that there's a little bit of magic in every slice of cake and every line of code… I think that pretty well sums up our great weekend at CakeFest.

How to push Docker image to Container Registry and create App on...

The title speaks for itself, let’s jump right in! As a preliminary step, we start from a user registered in DigitalOcean with a validated account. Use the doctl tool for the entire communication process with DigitalOcean.

Step 1: Install doctl

$ cd ~
$ wget https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl/releases/download/v1.71.0/doctl-1.71.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
$ tar xvf doctl-1.71.0-linux-amd64.tar.gz
$ sudo mv doctl /usr/local/bin
 

Step 2: Create an API token

  Go to https://cloud.digitalocean.com/account/api/tokens Generate new token for read and write and save apart the value of token generated <TOKEN NAME>: personaltoken 
<TOKEN VALUE>: 6e981fc2a674dbb7a610b9b85d0c8b00

Step 3: Use the API token to grant account access to doctl

$ doctl auth init --context personaltoken
Validating token... OK
Prompt for <TOKEN VALUE>, then enter it and press return 
 

Step 4: Validate that doctl is working

$ doctl auth init  Validating token... OK
  Prompt for <TOKEN VALUE>, then enter it and press return  Validate by obtaining the account information
$ doctl account get Email      Droplet Limit    Email Verified    UUID         Status [email protected]    10     true     5415bbf8-d501-4096-9b75-ab781c017948    active
 

Step 5: Create a Container Registry with doctl

<MY-REGISTRY-NAME> : container-nyc-795 <REGION> : nyc3
$ doctl registry create container-nyc-795 --region nyc3 Name       Endpoint        Region slug container-nyc-795    registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795    nyc3

Important: the region of the Container registry and Kubernetes cluster MUST be the same Keep in mind that container names must be unique, must be lowercase, and only accepts alphanumeric characters and hyphens.  

Step 6: Login to authenticate docker with your registry

$ doctl registry login
Logging Docker in to registry.digitalocean.com
 

Step 7: Create kubernetes cluster

$ doctl kubernetes cluster create cluster-static-example --region nyc3 Notice: Cluster is provisioning, waiting for cluster to be running ................................................................... Notice: Cluster created, fetching credentials Notice: Adding cluster credentials to kubeconfig file found in "/home/andres/.kube/config" Notice: Setting current-context to do-nyc3-cluster-static-example ID                                      Name                      Region    Version        Auto Upgrade    Status     Node Pools d24f180b-6007-4dbc-a2fe-3952801570aa    cluster-static-example    nyc3      1.22.7-do.0    false           running    cluster-static-example-default-pool
Important: the region of the Container registry and Kubernetes cluster MUST be the same here as well.  This operation isn’t a fast process.  

Step 8: Integrate kubernetes cluster in Container register

$ doctl kubernetes cluster registry add cluster-static-example
 

Step 9: Get token certificate and connect to cluster

$ doctl kubernetes cluster kubeconfig save cluster-static-example Notice: Adding cluster credentials to kubeconfig file found in "/home/andres/.kube/config" Notice: Setting current-context to do-nyc3-cluster-static-example
To validate this, use the kubectl tool to get context. If is not installed, get the last version you find - for example in googleapis
$ wget https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/v1.23.5/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl
$ chmod +x kubectl
$ sudo mv kubectl /usr/local/bin/
Check with
$ kubectl config current-context
do-nyc3-cluster-static-example
Here, you see: bash prompt do-ny3-cluster-sttic-example. That is the context you created in Step 7
 

Step 10: Generate docker image, tag and push to DigitalOcean

We assume that the user already has docker installed
$ mkdir myapp
$ mkdir myapp/html
$ nano myapp/Dockerfile
  Inside Dockerfile put   
FROM nginx:latest
COPY ./html/hello.html /usr/share/nginx/html/hello.htm
l
  We create simple Dockerfile with NGINX Server and copy the file hello.html in the default html of nginx  
$ nano myapp/html/hello.html
  Inside hello.html put  
<!DOCTYPE html> <html>  <head>    <title>Hello World!</title>  </head>  <body>    <p>This is an example of a simple HTML page served from the Nginx container.</p>  </body> </html>
Then build a docker image file tag with repository and push with docker
 
$ cd myapp
$ docker build -t registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app .
Sending build context to Docker daemon  3.584kB Step 1/2 : FROM nginx:latest latest: Pulling from library/nginx c229119241af: Pull complete 2215908dc0a2: Pull complete 08c3cb2073f1: Pull complete 18f38162c0ce: Pull complete 10e2168f148a: Pull complete c4ffe9532b5f: Pull complete Digest: sha256:2275af0f20d71b293916f1958f8497f987b8d8fd8113df54635f2a5915002bf1 Status: Downloaded newer image for nginx:latest  ---> 12766a6745ee Step 2/2 : COPY ./html/hello.html /usr/share/nginx/html/hello.html  ---> 2b9be913c377 Successfully built 2b9be913c377 Successfully tagged registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app:latest   $ docker images REPOSITORY                                               TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app   latest    2b9be913c377   2 minutes ago   142MB   $ docker push registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app Using default tag: latest The push refers to repository [registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app] ac03ae036a53: Pushed ea4bc0cd4a93: Pushed fac199a5a1a5: Pushed 5c77d760e1f4: Pushed 33cf1b723f65: Pushed ea207a4854e7: Pushed 608f3a074261: Pushed latest: digest: sha256:22615ad4c324ca5dc13fe2c3e1d2d801bd166165e3809f96ed6a96a2b2ca2748 size: 1777


Step 11: Create app

Create file example-static-app.yaml and insert: alerts:                                 
- rule: DEPLOYMENT_FAILED               
- rule: DOMAIN_FAILED                   
name: example-static-app                
region: nyc                             
services:                               
- http_port: 80                         
  image:                                
    registry_type: DOCR                 
    repository: static-app              
    tag: latest                         
  instance_count: 2                     
  instance_size_slug: professional-xs   
  name: static-service                  
  routes:                               
  - path: /                             
  source_dir: /             
              Validate file with
$  doctl apps spec validate example-static-app.yaml
Create app
$ doctl apps create --spec example-static-app.yaml
Notice: App created
ID        Spec Name             Default Ingress    Active Deployment ID    In Progress Deployment ID    Created At     Updated At
55a7cb68-65b7-4ff1-b6af-388cdb1df507    example-static-app   2022-03-30 09:34:01.288257225 +0000 UTC    2022-03-30 09:34:01.288257225 +0000 UTC
If you access https://cloud.digitalocean.com/apps And in the live url + /hello.html you can see:

Step 12: Deploy app

If you modify the code of your app, you need to generate a new image with docker and push  (see step 10). Then you don’t need to create a new app, you need to deploy the image in the already created app, with the id executing the command to deploy in bash.
$  doctl apps create-deployment 55a7cb68-65b7-4ff1-b6af-388cdb1df507

 

How to generate deploy of Docker image to Container Registry on DigitalOcean Platform Apps

Once you have created the application (and if you have the code in gitlab), you can create a direct deployment of your code in the DigitalOcean container and deploy on top of your application.

Step 1: Define variables

First two variables are defined in gitlab. You can find these inside project in the left menu - enter in Settings > CI/CD > Variables $DIGITALOCEAN_API_KEY = token generated in DigitalOcean dashboard $APP_ID = previously generated application identifier   More can be defined as the name of the repository. The value of these variables will be injected into the file that we will create below in the Step 3  

 

Step 2: Register runner in gitlab

In your project in the left menu, go to Settings > CI/CD > Runners Create a specific runner for the project in the URL with registration token. Register GitLab Runner from the command line. It is important to use docker and privileged
# Download the binary for your system
sudo curl -L --output /usr/local/bin/gitlab-runner https://gitlab-runner-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/latest/binaries/gitlab-runner-linux-amd64

# Give it permission to execute
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/gitlab-runner

# Register runner
sudo gitlab-runner register -n --url https://git.cakedc.com --registration-token GR1348941gx7sgV3pZFQgRqg5qUR_ --executor docker --description "My Docker Runner" --docker-image "docker:19.03.12" --docker-privileged --docker-volumes "/certs/client"
 

Step 3: Create file gitlab-ci.yml 

The gitlab-ci.yml file takes care of

  • Authentication and identification using doctl in DigitalOcean
  • Generating and sending the docker image to the DigitalOcean container
  • Deploying the container image to an existing app
Create the file gitlab-ci.yml in the root of your project as
image: docker:20-dind

variables:
  DOCKER_HOST: tcp://docker:2375
  DOCKER_DRIVER: overlay2
  DOCKER_TLS_CERTDIR: ""
  REPOSITORY_URL: registry.digitalocean.com/container-nyc-795/static-app
  CONTAINER_NAME: static-app

services:
  - name: docker:20-dind
    alias: docker
    command: ["--tls=false"]

before_script:
  - apk update
  - apk upgrade
  - apk add doctl --repository=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community
  - docker info

build:
  stage: build
  script:
    - doctl auth init --access-token $DIGITALOCEAN_API_KEY
    - doctl account get     
    - echo $DIGITALOCEAN_API_KEY | docker login -u $DIGITALOCEAN_API_KEY --password-stdin registry.digitalocean.com
    - docker build -t $REPOSITORY_URL:latest .
    - docker push $REPOSITORY_URL
    - doctl apps create-deployment $APP_ID
Now, every time you do a git push in your project, the runner will automatically inject the variables defined previously in the gitlab-ci.yml file. Then, it will generate a docker image with docker (docker-in-docker) to create an image of your project, send it to the digitalocean repository and deploy it in the app configured.   That’s it!  

We Bake with CakePHP