Author: Muhammad Jawaid Shamshad

Awesome list of FREE tools Startups should be using

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin TechnologyLeave a Comment on Awesome list of FREE tools Startups should be using

This is a curated list of free tools for everything from productivity to hosting to development tools to designing. These tools are all digital i.e., either app, online service, or downloadable software. Most of them are either free or have limited free option that is enough for startups. Feel free to suggest and contribute to this list.

You can find the original list maintained at GitHub at https://github.com/Ibexoft/awesome-startup-tools-list/.

Tech

Git Repos

Cloud App Hosting:

Static Site Hosting:

DNS, CDN, & SSL:

Site Performance Tools:

Web Scraping Tools

Development IDE/Editors:

Development online platforms/IDEs:

Development Playgrounds

Resource Management Tools

Utilities:

Automated Code Reviews, linting, coding conventions

Testing

Email Service for Developers

Notification (Push, SMS etc) Service for Developers

Changelog

Business, Marketing, Sales, Finance

Idea Validation

Content Management Systems (CMS):

Ecommerce CMS:

Analytics:

Accounting & Finance

CRM:

Team Chat

Customer Support/Live Chat:

Social Media

Sales & Marketing:

Productivity, Management, Organization

Note-taking & Reading:

Project/Task Management:

Attendance, Time Tracking and Management:

Graphics, Design, and Media

Video making:

Stock Photos/Illustrations:

Online Logo:

Designing & Editing:

How to undo the last git commit?

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin BitBucket, Git, Source ControlLeave a Comment on How to undo the last git commit?

There are situations where you just committed a change in git and just after that realized you made a mistake in the last git commit. If you haven’t pushed that code then the last local changes can be undone with the following command.

git reset --soft HEAD~1

What this does is that it uncommits the last git commit and puts that back in a staged state. That means if you run the git status command then you will see those changes in your working directory. Now you can make further changes to that revision and then commit again.

See the complete documentation about git-reset on the official site.

Read more posts about git here.

Why database should be taught before programming in universities?

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin .Net, Android, AngularJS, ASP.Net, C/C++, C#, Database, HTML/CSS, Javascript, jQuery, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PHP, Ruby, Web Development, XMLLeave a Comment on Why database should be taught before programming in universities?
Database Programming
Learn Database before Coding

Often students from the initial semester ask me how do we store our data in our programming projects? When students join university to learn about computer science and technology they are usually taught programming first in courses like introduction to programming. As part of the coursework, students are required to work on a project. The majority of the projects, in fact almost all projects involve data handling and that data needs to be stored somewhere, usually in databases.

Problems Students Face

As a novice students don’t know how to store data. One option is to store data in plain text files if filing is taught to them but in that case, their project becomes too complex for them. In my opinion, file format is an advanced topic for students that have just started learning how to program. So, students get stuck on where and how to store data. They create variables and arrays to store data in memory but that is not very useful until they have the option to store their data somewhere permanently that they can retrieve later. Otherwise, every time they run their project they have to feed data from the beginning.

Teach Database Before Programming

If universities modify their courses and add database in the first semester and replace programming courses with it then it would be easier for students to get started in computer science degree. Introduction to databases is a relatively easier course than programming and students will know what a database is, how to store data in the database, and how to retrieve it later using SQL. Then in the next semester if they do a programming course then it will require only one lecture to teach them how to access a database from your code and how to store and retrieve data. That will make their projects more valuable and make more sense to them and they can take it to an advanced level in forthcoming courses.

Your Take?

What is your opinion? Please, let me know in the comments.

Click here to read more about Databases.

Creating Git branch in detached HEAD State

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin BitBucket, Git, Source ControlLeave a Comment on Creating Git branch in detached HEAD State
git detached head

Recently, I came across a situation where I checked out a git branch and it showed me this message related to detached HEAD state:

You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout.

I guess this happened because the branch that I was checking out was rebased. Otherwise, it usually happens when you checkout a commit with its hash. But in my case, I was checking out a branch. Anyway, this is a special state called “detached HEAD”. While you can commit changes in this state, those commits don’t belong to any branch and will become inaccessible as soon as you check out another branch. But what if you do want to keep those commits?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is to use the “checkout” command again and you can use the same branch again:

git checkout <branch> #now you're in detached head state
# do some work and stage it
git add --all
git commit -m "add some work while in detached head state"
git branch <branch>
git checkout <branch>

Pretty easy, right?

Read more articles related to git here.

Missing Hibernate option in Windows 10/11 Power Options?

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin Microsoft, WindowsLeave a Comment on Missing Hibernate option in Windows 10/11 Power Options?

Is Hibernate option missing from the Power Options in the Control Panel like in the screenshot below?

Missing Hibernate option

Here is a way to restore the missing Hibernate option back to the Power Options.

How to fix it?

Click the Cortana Search box on your taskbar, type cmd, right-click on the Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.

cmd as administrator

Once the Command Prompt is launched, type in the following command to enable the Hibernate feature.

powercfg /hibernate on

Next, run the following command to change the hibernation file type to full.

powercfg /h /type full

powercfg command

Reboot your computer. You should see the Hibernate option show up in the Power Options now.

Hibernate option

Enjoy!

Click here to read more about Windows

Google Chrome: How to change the look & feel?

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin Google, WebLeave a Comment on Google Chrome: How to change the look & feel?

This is a quick post about how to change the look & feel of the Google Chrome browser.

Just open a new tab and browse to:

chrome://flags/#top-chrome-md

There you will see different options.

chrome

Each option has a different UI. The refresh option is for Material Design. So, if you are a fan of MD then you should try this one.

Click here to read more tech articles.

Mounting NFS Share on Windows 10 & 11 with Write Access

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin Linux, Microsoft, RedHat, Technology, Windows5 Comments on Mounting NFS Share on Windows 10 & 11 with Write Access

It is easy to mount a drive from Linux NFS share on Windows 10 & 11 machines. To do that make sure you have NFS Client (Services for NFS) installed from Programs and Features. Following is the command to mount the NFS drive. Note that this command will run on cmd (Command Prompt) and not on PowerShell.

mount \<IP_ADDRESS>\<PATH_TO_DIR>\ drive:

For example, if the IP address of the NFS share is 10.235.0.10 and the directory you want to share is /var/www and you want to mount it to your Z drive, then you can run the following command.

mount \\10.235.0.10\var\www z:

But when you mount the drive you can browse the files using your Windows Explorer but you cannot create new files or edit any files.

How to enable write access on NFS share?

To get write access on NFS share you have to make a small change in the Windows registry before mounting the drive. Follow these steps.

  1. Open regedit by typing it in the search box end pressing Enter.
  2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ClientForNFS\CurrentVersion\Default.
  3. Create a new New DWORD (32-bit) Value inside the Default folder named AnonymousUid and assign the UID found on the Linux directory as shared by the NFS system. This is the UID of the user that has the write access to that directory on the Linux system.
  4. Create a new New DWORD (32-bit) Value inside the Default folder named AnonymousGid and assign the GID found on the Linux directory as shared by the NFS system. This is the GID of the group that has the write access to the directory on the Linux system.
  5. Restart the NFS client or reboot the machine to apply the changes.

Now run the mount command and you will get the write access.

Click here to read more about Microsoft Windows.

And click here to read more about Linux. 

Mark parent category menu active on single custom post view in WordPress

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin HTML/CSS, PHP, Web, Web Development, WordPressLeave a Comment on Mark parent category menu active on single custom post view in WordPress

Recently I developed a theme for one of my clients and I had to highlight the menu item of the parent category in the main menu when one of its associated single custom posts was viewed. For that, I had to add an action in my functions.php file for nav_menu_css_class. It returns the ‘active’ class, which WordPress adds to the parent category menu item in the main menu. You can see the code at Gist here or below.

<?php

add_action('nav_menu_css_class', 'add_current_nav_class', 10, 2 );

function add_current_nav_class($classes, $item) {
    // Getting the current post details
    global $post;

    // Getting the post type of the current post
    $current_post_type = get_post_type_object(get_post_type($post->ID));
    $current_post_type_slug = $current_post_type->rewrite['slug'];

    // Getting the URL of the menu item
    $menu_slug = strtolower(trim($item->url));

    // If the menu item URL contains the current post types slug add the current-menu-item class
    if (strpos($menu_slug,$current_post_type_slug) !== false) {
        $classes[] = 'active';
    }

    // Return the corrected set of classes to be added to the menu item
    return $classes;
}
?>

Adding above code in you functions.php file will do the trick.

Click here to read more on WordPress.

Why we moved from OpenShift to Google Cloud

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin Cloud Platform, Google, Linux, OpenShift, RedHat, Web, Web DevelopmentLeave a Comment on Why we moved from OpenShift to Google Cloud

The good old days

When OpenShift was in its version 1 it was great from the customer’s point of view with a low budget. OpenShift v1 had free offers to deploy apps and add a custom domain to it. There was no SSL support but it could be handled via the CloudFlare solution, making the overall solution a great one.

Then there comes OpenShift v2

RedHat then launched OpenShift v2 and added a restriction that gears will be shut down after a certain period of inactivity and also removed the support for custom domain.

That was the time that we had to move to some other cloud platform that could support our apps with low resources and without investing anything. Because all good things in life are free.

Google Cloud to the rescue

So we came across the Google Cloud platform offering and we had $300 credit in a free trial for 6 months. That was more than enough for us to start with. And in fact, they have micro virtual machine instances that are free for life with 30GB storage. That is more than enough for small apps to run for free that are under experiment or don’t have any monetization plans.

So, we migrated several of our apps from OpenShift to Google Cloud and started leveraging free credits provided by Google.

Just this week we consumed all our credit and our trial expired. Our virtual machine instances were shut down, but it didn’t take long before we enabled billing on our project and downgraded our instances to micro ones which are free. That gave us such a relief that our apps are still running although with low resources but it is fine as they are not our revenue-generating apps and are just experiments.

Click here to read more about Google.

Codenvy and BitBucket Integration

by Muhammad Jawaid Shamshadin BitBucket, CI/CD, Docker, Source ControlLeave a Comment on Codenvy and BitBucket Integration

OK, this post is a quick one about BitBucket integration. Let’s go!

In your Codenvy workspace go to Profile > Preferences > SSH > VCS and generate a key and give it the name bitbucket.org. This will generate a key for you. Copy this key by viewing it which we will use later on BitBucket.

Now go to BitBucket, select your repository, and then go to repository settings. Under the Access Keys menu click Add Key button. Give a label as bitbucket.org and paste the key copied in the previous step here and save.

Now on the Codenvy project go to the Git menu and add remote. You need to give the SSH URL to your BitBucket repo here. Add it and you can now pull the repo from BitBucket. Awesome!

Click here to read more about git on the Ibexoft blog.