freistil News

(Finally) PHP 7.3 (and 7.2 for that matter) is now available on freistilbox.

Customers can go to their cluster on the freistilbox dashboard and create a new website using PHP 7.3 right away.

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Earlier today, I gave a talk at DrupalCamp Scotland about the many advantages of a monorepo over the traditional “multirepo” approach of creating a separate version control repository for each new project. I am immensely grateful for all the praise I got from attendees, both immediately after the talk and later over drinks at Hemma.

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Every web developer eventually finds themselves in the situation that a client complains about bad website performance. This is an important issue because performance problems will deter visitors and might even turn into availability problems. Resolving it quickly is important for retaining a healthy business relationship with your client. But it’s not easy to resolve a performance issue in a swift and satisfactory manner when there can be any number of causes.

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A Varnish proxy cache speeds up content delivery by orders of magnitude and has been part of our managed hosting platform since we started in 2010. By storing content in RAM, Varnish saves your web application from having to execute expensive rendering processes for each and every incoming request. However, cache objects have an expiry time, which can cause Varnish to deliver stale versions of content that has since been updated in the application.

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Over the last two weeks, we’ve started rolling out a new generation of edge routers for our managed hosting platform freistilbox. By automatically provisioning SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt, they enable our customers to secure their website traffic easily and free of charge. And with 10 Gbps uplinks and HTTP/2 support, we’re putting a nice performance boost on top.

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Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

We’re a busy distributed team here at freistil IT. That makes steady communication both essential and challenging. Continuously sharing your work progress is important for reaching business objectives. Giving people insight into your personal situation strengthens team relationships. This practice is called “narrating your work” or “Working Out Loud”. However, it’s not easy to strike a balance between the polar responses of “Seriously? Why didn’t you share that earlier?” and “Gee, I really didn’t need to know that.”

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freistilbox customers know our slogan: “Work efficiently. Sleep peacefully.” Today, we’re happy to tell you that we’ve made your resting time even more relaxed. Your websites are now protected by the new freistilbox Web Application Firewall.

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In my post “Working out loud doesn’t mean being noisy”, I’ve laid out how we at freistil IT make sure everyone on our distributed team is on the same page with regard to both the progress of our work and the state of the people who are doing it. This way of intentional communication is sometimes called “Narrating your work” or simply “Working out loud”. A few weeks ago, I’ve started an experiment of significantly extending the audience with which I share my progress. In fact, I broadcast my software engineering work live on the streaming platform Twitch.

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