Gabriel Zerbib

Gabriel has been enjoying crafting software for almost three decades, during which he learned that most technologies are pleasurable, the moment you understand which particular problem it comes to solve. Father of three, lecturer, Gabriel is currently employed at Wix.com and is always happy to share knowledge and experience.

twitter: @zzgab

Articles

Introduction to Diagram-as-Code

By Gabriel Zerbib

The documentation of source code and APIs have now moved to the source files side. There are tools that make it possible to extract the documentary blocks, to always keep the manual and the code in phase without duplicating the effort. However, a good drawing is better than a long speech, and it becomes more necessary than ever to practice Diagram as Code (DaC) to incorporate technical illustrations directly in the sources. by Gabriel Zerbib

Published in Parallelize Your Code, February 2022

Automating with GitHub Actions

By Gabriel Zerbib

The discipline of CI/CD, which increases the quality and the velocity, is essential in the software industry, both in open source and in business projects, with ever more numerous and practical tools. Successful development companies are increasingly regarding it as a mandatory skill, and we can clearly understand why once we have gotten into the habit of automating these operations. This article demonstrates setting up a CI pipeline with GitHub Actions.

Published in Debug, Rinse, Repeat, June 2021

Evolving to Modern Front-End with ReactJS

By Gabriel Zerbib

Using PHP templates to render all the HTML that makes a web application sometimes has drawbacks. Good client-side libraries in JavaScript exit to help build highly dynamic, reusable Web fragments and achieve optimal user interaction. This article introduces the ReactJS approach and a few hints for gently migrating some of the PHP-generated HTML code back to its natural habitat in the client tier.

Published in Newfangled Views, January 2021

End-to-End Testing Automation With PuPHPeteer

By Gabriel Zerbib

In general, we perceive the frontend part of a user-facing application as difficult to test in an automated way, and we often relegate these checks to a manual task. In this article, we examine how to use the Puppeteer tool and its PHP bridge, PuPHPeteer, to ensure deterministic validation of the browser side of a web application.

Published in Master of Puppets, September 2019

Diving in the OPcache

By Gabriel Zerbib

Once a mere HTML forms processor, PHP has dramatically evolved into a capable, mature programming language. But it was never tailored to support the distribution of a program in a non-source code package. In this article, we study some of the engine’s internal mechanisms and consider a few observations with the OPcache extension to propose a simple modification which could open the way to the deployment of pre-compiled PHP programs.

Published in DevOps Depths – January 2019, January 2019

Self-Host Your Team’s Git With Gitolite

By Gabriel Zerbib

If you wish to set up a private Git server for your personal, work, or team projects, but favor free software and simple architecture, or don’t want a service hosted by a third party, then Gitolite is the solution for you.

Published in Command and Control – June 2018, June 2018 —Available for Free