Many of these articles originally appeared on the Magentron Blog.
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Posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2026 by Jeroen Derks
How I use AI agents like Claude Code and Codex in a structured plan-review-iterate workflow to build software — from planning to implementation to review, all running in isolated Docker containers.
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Posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2026 by Jeroen Derks
Dutch telecom Odido just confirmed a breach affecting 6.2 million customer accounts, including passport numbers and validity dates. ID scans weren't leaked this time, but what if they had been? That's why protecting digital copies of your ID is essential.
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Posted on Sunday, December 1st, 2024 by Jeroen Derks
The 3-2-1 rule, encryption, offsite storage, and the best backup tools for Mac, Windows, and Linux. A practical guide to protecting your data.
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Posted on Sunday, December 1st, 2024 by Jeroen Derks
A syntax validation tool for Laravel Blade templates. Find errors in your views before your users do.
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Published on Monday 16 October 2017 by Jeroen Derks
Sometimes you want to know in a simple PHP script what the current URL (the URL through which the PHP script is called) is. When I was looking for a solution without reinventing the wheel, I actually found no piece of PHP code that met my expectations. So let me try it as well.
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Published on Tuesday 3 October 2017 by Jeroen Derks
Many times when I checking for example access or error logs, I need to know my public or external IP address (these days most people by now should be using NAT at home because their Internet access router configures it out of the box so that they cannot simply use ifconfig or ipconfig to see which IP address is in use).
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Published on Thursday 29 December 2016 by Jeroen Derks
In the last week two critical issues where discovered by Dawid Golunski in PHPMailer, a library to facilitate sending email messages using PHP.
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Published on Tuesday 22 May 2012 by Jeroen Derks
For one of my projects I needed to programmatically create a random coupon for a specific product in Magento. Since I did not find an exact sample that I could use I decided to post my solution here.
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Published on Tuesday 22 May 2012 by Jeroen Derks
In this post I will provide a simple solution to adding customer authentication to the Magento API. Adding functionality to the Magento API is already well documented in the Magento wiki page Creating a custom API or extending the Core API, so we will not dive into that.
The idea is to simply call the same login() function used in the frontend and then check for customer authentication in every API call that requires it.
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Published on Sunday 06 May 2012 by Jeroen Derks
Since there is a lot of work to do for Magento, I have been looking to find some help. In my experience it is very difficult to determine the knowledge and expertise of a candidate until he/she is actually working on a project with you. During my search I have compiled a list of questions to help make the decision on who to actually talk to. When actually talking to a candidate, the questions are used to discuss the various topics more in depth.
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Published on Monday 20 February 2012 by Jeroen Derks
Magento Connect has many, many extensions, but which of them could be useful for the developers, novice users and other users of Magento? Working with Magento as a developer has led me to some useful extensions to make my life and that of my customers easier.
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Published on Friday 16 December 2011 by Jeroen Derks
Well, it happened to me before, but of course it was already such a long time ago that the solution was only passively available in my brain. So I imported a bunch of products (again). But this time all the products that I had imported disappeared. I checked the database, but the products were there. How to deal with this?
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Published on Tuesday 11 October 2011 by Jeroen Derks
It does not happen often, but sometimes my computer crashes. Most programs and their data are fine after, however, Thunderbird is not one of those. Sometimes after a crash the popstate.dat file is corrupted, empty or missing. See also Thunderbird bug #263142.
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Published on Wednesday 20 July 2011 by Jeroen Derks
To view the version of installed Magento extensions, you can go to Magento Connect Manager. But then you have to go out of the admin, log in again, and then go back. It works, but I would prefer to see the version information together with the extension configuration in the Magento administration configuration section. This can be easily achieved with 2 or 3 small modifications.
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Published on Tuesday 05 July 2011 by Jeroen Derks
So, do you ever get email with images that need to be loaded because they are not or not properly attached to the email? I do, and I have to say I don't really like it. Of course, there is the trade-off that the email size will increase if they are attached, but if the sender keeps the number and size of the images small the email should still be at an acceptable size.
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Published on Monday 04 July 2011 by Jeroen Derks
While writing the unit tests for our new extension EmailImages we discovered that there was no easy way in Ecomdev_PHPUnit (or at least no documented way) to enable the use of the cache. It seemed it would only work without the cache enabled. Since our module caches images that were downloaded to be attached to an email, we would like to at least use the unit test to get 100% code coverage and to see in the log file that the cache was actually being used for these images.
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