Frank on Software (Page 2)

Regaining trust in your test suite with Docker.

19 Jan 2018 • 3 min read

Docker, and containerised services in general, have brought a lot to the world of software development. While not everybody is (or ever should be) using docker as their deployment method, it's usefulness far exceeds being just a platform to run services on in production. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Testing PHP integrations. For Flysystem [https://flysystem.thephpleague.com], an open source PHP package to...

Partitioning for concurrency in synchronous business processes.

1 Oct 2017 • 8 min read

The PHP landscape is getting more and more diverse. The typical PHP + MySQL combination is no longer the only way of doing things. Applications in PHP are not just fancy database wrappers anymore. The solutions we build today do far more than just model the solution-space around storing records in databases. We use queueing systems, background processing, alternative storage solutions,...

Battle Log: Symfony Routing performance considerations.

28 Feb 2017 • 7 min read

Last week I took a deep dive into Symfony's Routing Component [http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/routing.html]. A project I worked on suffered from a huge performance penalty caused by a routing mistake. This lead me on the path to discovering some interesting performance considerations. Some common practices align nicely with Symfony's optimisations, let's look into those. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------...

How a 20mb data-set brought down a 14gb ElasticSearch cluster.

15 Jul 2016 • 7 min read

For a client project we are using ElasticSearch (ES) as one of our read-models. The use-case was pretty straight forward and the amount of data was super small. However, our problems were pretty big. It got to a point where we had to reboot our cluster periodically to prevent it from crashing. So, what was going on? Let's dig in....

Finally, file streams, and deferred execution in PHP.

31 May 2016 • 4 min read

Cleaning up after yourself can be a tedious task. For example, closing file handlers after using them needs to be done. A programmer's life isn't all about the happy path. When things go pear-shaped you might end up duplicating cleanup code throughout your code. This is horrible, let's explore an alternative. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A typical scenario which requires cleanup is the...

"Scaling" Vagrant with NGINX Load Balancing

4 Mar 2016 • 7 min read

A load-balanced vagrant setup, because why the hell not! Not all projects require more that one instance of your application to handle the demand. When you do, you want to be prepared. You'll want to know which steps you have to take and which limitations you'll encounter. Let's get our feet wet. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Already know why you would use load...

Pipelines, immutability and privates.

4 Dec 2015 • 3 min read

A recent addition to the PHP League was the pipeline package, which allows you to compose sequential operations. One of the key aspects of the pipeline is that it's immutable. During the development of Pipeline, I learned a few lessons that I'd like to share with you. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When I started working on the Pipeline package, I wanted to create...

Onboarding and Ansible Galaxy.

27 Sep 2015 • 3 min read

When you start working on a new project, there are usually a couple of steps you'll need to follow to get up and running. This process is called on-boarding. One of the steps in this process is getting your local development environment setup. On every team I've worked we've used Vagrant. Any provisioning is done using Ansible, a simple configuration...

Packages vs. Components: The Dependency Problem.

26 Jun 2015 • 6 min read

The PHP landscape has fully transitioned into its Package Age™. Packagist is the main resource for retrieving new PHP packages: most frameworks split out packages from their main distribution to allow re-use outside of the framework. The world is a happy place. > DISCLAIMER: Based on the research of this blogpost, I've enclosed details to @seldaek, some of these issues might...

Rendering ReactJS templates server-side.

18 May 2015 • 7 min read

The last couple of months I've been working with ReactJS quite extensively. It's been a very rewarding and insightful journey. There is, however, one part that kept coming back to me: server-side rendering. How on earth am I going to use ReactJS when I want to render my templates on the server? So, I sat down and looked at the...