Week 27
Well, well... the applause and accolades are finally dying down after my momentous achievement last week... I passed the Acquia Drupal 10 Certified Developer exam and now I am even appearing in the list!
Okay, okay... enough about that... but you gotta blow you own trumpet now and again, right? Celebrate your successes? I hope you do!
Logging
It was back to my main project this week with more work to do on processing stale accounts. You may remember back in week 24, I had made some improvements to the logging and this particularly paid dividends this week as we were able to see clearly (as far as it's ever possible to see clearly) what was going on during the process. It got me thinking about logging best practices... here are a few thoughts:
- proximity of the logging - think through whether the logging should be closely situated with the data being processed (typically the database) or situated elsewhere (typically the file system or a database) with appropriate references
- a log message must be complete without being an essay: it must convey adequate information to be useful... think of the five W's, Who, What, When, Where and Why
- only log what you'd be happy sending on a postcard - simply do not log sensitive data, (or if you absolutely must, hash or encrypt it), consider the legal requirements around personal data... if in doubt, do not log it
What are your logging best practices? Let me know on Twitter!
Things past me knew, forgot about but was reminded of this week
This is a new feature to these weekly updates... this week it was the Unix time command. Prefix what you're running with time and when what you're running completes, you'll be presented with information about how long the thing took. Sweet!
Outside the developer cabin
I supported a chap called Jell Pelletier on his Bob Graham Round, I ran with him on leg 5 from Honister to Keswick... he even entrusted me with his GoPro to film the final stages of his epic adventure.