Posted by Greg Doak & Rainer Kraft on Feb 16, 2023

PHP UK Conference

We were lucky enough to be attendees at the recent PHPUK Conference hosted at the Brewery in Central London. The conference ran from Wednesday 15th to Thursday 16th of February 2023 and over the course of these two days we got to experience a variety of knowledgeable developers speaking on topics they were passionate about.

The format of the conference is that there are three talks going on at the same time, and these talks are split into different lanes which gives people the opportunity to pick and choose which talks they want to see.

Below we’re highlighted our three favourite talks.

Posted by Max Baldanza on Jan 19, 2023

Update PHP version from 7.4 to 8.1

Introduction

The majority of MyBuilder apps and services run on PHP. PHP7.4 end of life was November 2022, this meant that the version we were using had already stopped receiving bug fixes and would subsequently stop receiving security updates from November the 28th. This gave us a few months time to update all our applications so that we were not exposed to any known security vulnerabilities.

At the time of updating, PHP8.1 was the latest supported version (but of course PHP8.2 has now been released) so 8.1 is the version we chose to update to. I’ll go through some of my favourite features of PHP8, explain our process, issues we faced and how we did it. Hopefully it gives you the confidence to do the same.

Posted by Jack Coles on Dec 05, 2022

Salesforce Live - UK & Ireland

Wednesday the 30th, I took the opportunity to go to Salesforce Live at the ExCel in London. Aimed at the managers/leaders, the day consisted of 2 keynotes and an assortment of high level talks spread across 5 ‘theatres’. Guest speakers from the NHS, DPD, MuleSoft and even Formula 1 graced the stages to give attendees of the sell out event insight into how they’ve gotten the most out of Salesforce for their businesses.

The day was kicked off by the incredibly talented National Youth Jazz Orchestra - responsible for nurturing one of the great talents of our time, Amy Winehouse. They did a fantastic rendition of “Feelin’ Good” by Nina Simone which set the theme for the event… A new day.

Posted by Edd Mann on Apr 28, 2022

Containerising the DataDog Agent for HTTP health-checks using DigitalOcean App Platform and Terraform

We have been a big fan of DataDog and the level of telemetry/monitoring it provides us for many years now. One such aspect of monitoring that we employ throughout the services we maintain are HTTP health checks, which are intentionally run on a separate cloud provider to our primary which is AWS. DataDog has supplied the ability to handle running these checks via their agent for many years, providing us with a sufficient blackbox means of ensuring a service is functioning as expected. This past week we explored the viability of containerising this responsibility into a service which could be run on a Serverless platform such as the DigitalOcean App Platform.

Posted by Justin Hogg on Apr 11, 2022

Technical & non-Technical SEO at BrightonSEO

I was fortunate to be able to make it down to Brighton to spend a day listening to some great technical and non-technical talks on SEO at BrightonSEO 2022. I was particularly impressed on how many people attended the event and the quality of the talks.

It was interesting to see and hear key speakers so passionate about what they do so it was great that some opinions went against the general feeling that content with intent is king. It was good to hear how obtaining backlinks is a difficult job for everyone and how Digital PR, contacting journalists, is a huge part of successful back linking.

Posted by Edd Mann on Mar 25, 2022

Can you name that AWS service?

I have always been amazed by the sheer amount of services AWS offers. Although I spend a lot of time working within AWS, I am always surprised to find yet another service that I did not know existed. Better still, is with each new service comes an associated new service icon. This is why I thought it would be interesting (and somewhat educational) to build a small trivia game which quizzes you on AWS service icons.

Posted by Tom Cant on Mar 01, 2022

Handling redirects with CloudFront Functions

Over the years we’ve seen countless methods for handling redirects in web applications. From the Apache rewrite rule to AWS ALBs, Lambda@Edge, and even with S3 object metadata. In this post I’m going to share yet another method that we’ve recently started using at MyBuilder: CloudFront Functions.

Posted by Jim Maclean on Feb 10, 2022

Get started with web performance

It makes logical sense that ‘faster’ pages are ‘better’ pages. They get things done faster, score better for SEO, use less energy and people like them. This is how I took a page important for SEO at mybuilder.com and cut its metrics in half.

Posted by Edd Mann on Feb 08, 2022

Separating out the Lambda Bref runtime from your projects Composer dependencies

Having had great success using AWS Lambda within our insurance product (MyBuilder Plus), late last year we made the decision to move all our web request traffic over to the platform! However, we noticed when attempting to migrate over one application in particular, that we could not use the latest release of Bref (the PHP runtime) due to a conflict between required Symfony Process component versions.

Posted by Edd Mann on Feb 03, 2022

Using GitHub Actions to send Gone Live release notes via Email and Slack

Ensuring that both the tech team and company as a whole are aware of changes that have just been released is very important. This keeps everyone in the loop with the work that the tech team are carrying out, and how the system is changing over time. Last year we transitioned away from Jenkins to GitHub Actions to manage our CI pipelines, and in the process was able to revise how we notified interested parties about releases.