Piotr PasichPHP, Symfony, Design Patterns
Paying for goods with Bitcoin is becoming more and more popular. If you run, maintain or develop an e-commerce website, ICO project, exchange, or trading system, you may be interested in a quick way of integrating with the Bitcoin blockchain.
This article will show one of many ways of installing a Bitcoin mining software and integrating a PHP application with it. I will present how to generate an address for your users and check if the transactions are confirmed.
Continue reading
Interest in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency is greater than ever. The value has just reached 6500 USD and it shows no signs of decreasing in the near future. Moreover, the whole cryptocurrency market is growing – every day brings new applications, ICOs, exchange systems, and ideas to be developed or maintained by programmers. Implementing new features or business logic requires deep knowledge about the cryptocurrency, in this specific example, about Bitcoin.
All resources that I have found on the internet or books about Bitcoin or Ethereum describe the basic concepts, investment process or highly technical stuff in the blockchain. Therefore, for any programmer who would like to integrate with the Bitcoin network, there is a huge gap between and lack of information. This article is a part of series where I would like to give you an introduction to the Bitcoin cryptocurrency, to its historical background, and explain its underlying mechanisms and show how to integrate or communicate with its API.
During my journey with the cryptocurrency, I realized this is a common problem to find a highly qualified programmer who used to work with the cryptocurrency network. This is like finding a big panda in China – they are super rare. So, finally I was called a big panda and because I like to have some big panda friends, I decided to share the knowledge and my experience.
I will create a set of articles about the blockchain, the idea and general view, cryptocurrency – the Bitcoin, the Ethereum (including smart contracts), EOS (new fancy cryptocurrency that may be a trendsetter next year) and all troubles and problems that we faced.
From my personal experience, it came that the blockchain idea is both – technical and intricate. Coding without a strong knowledge about the background and idea of the blockchain brings to a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. Let’s start with the idea.
PhpUK is a conference I have wanted to attend for a long long time. I had watched all the videos on youtube really carefully for the last few years and always got this weird feeling this might be one of the best and most important conferences in Europe. So, here I am.
3 totally different paths available for attendees made the choice of my own quite difficult. Sometimes, I had to skip presentations I wanted to see, because they were happening at the same time as those I wanted to see even more. From time to time, I was bored. But, at the end, I have created my own track and I am happy with the result. If you do not have the time to watch all the presentations online, and it does not matter if in video or slides format, then I would be happy to share my totally subjective choices.
All programmers have read or at least heard about the methods to hack the website’s security. Or even faced this problem. A the same time, the creativity of people who want to break a website is endless, so all bottlenecks should be well secured. That’s why I would like to start a series of short articles where a bunch of basic methods and techniques of hacking websites will be presented.
In the last two episodes we have configured the Docker environment and automated deployment with Elastic Beanstalk, but still the process requires some manual actions and I personally would like to avoid any unnecessary interference in the process. So, today I will walk you through combining all the pieces together and automating the process fully. A continuous integration system will be placed between developer’s environment and final servers. I’ll present how to achieve all of that with Codeship. What make me choose this particular mechanism? The simplicity of setting up, number of additional tools ready to use without installation and finally the fact that it isn’t time consuming.
In the previous part we set up a dedicated Symfony application on Docker virtual containers and prepared environments that may be transferred between developers during project cycle. The next step is to prepare the application for pushing into the cloud. There are many options available on the market – Heroku, DigitalOcean and, my favorite, AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
I have spent a lot of time watching presentations about automated deployment with Ansible, Capifony, Capistrano or making consistent environments with Vagrant or VirtualBox, but all of those presentations did not tought me how to build environment from scratch, to achieve complete continuous delivery system. And that’s why I decided to create a series of tutorials in which we will configure a virtual machine, join the configuration to the project, automatically deploy and connect everything together with a continuous delivery tool.
A couple of weeks ago I have discovered a new service – the livecoding.tv. It is a livestreaming platform where people code products, live. They connect people around the programming languages that they love. Streamers are a mix of professional engineers, students and hobby coders. So, I have decided to join the community and broadcast own live video or videos.
Two days ago I have published a post at X-Team blog about achieving continuous deployment process. To do so, I choose the Docker for visualization, AWS Elastic Beanstalk as a delivery environment and Codeship as continuous integration system.
The tutorial is created as a video screencasting starting from a basic Symfony application and and carried us to the fully automated environment. We start from configuring Docker on local machine, preparing the integration with Amazon Webservices and automating the deployment with Codeship.
