• 3 min read
On the 13th of January 2022, version 3.0.0 of Flysystem was released. The library ships a couple new methods on the main filesystem and adapter interfaces, making it a breaking change that cause a major version increase.
• 8 min read
Integrating services over API's exposes your application to a range of possible failures. At scale, any network interaction can and will fail. Implementing a retry mechanism is a common approach to increase fault tolerance. Taking into account how systems fail when designing software can greatly improve the quality of your code. In this blogpost I'd like to show how I...
• 9 min read
Over the years, my coding practices have changed a lot. From hacking away until it works to TDD/BDD/DDD and everything in between. One of the biggest changes in my developer career has been when, why, and how I test my code. In particular, my view on mocking frameworks has changed a lot. A couple of years ago I...
• 3 min read
In my day to day job I write in a number of programming languages. The majority of my time is spent writing PHP but I very much enjoy writing other languages, such as Go and Javascript, too! One of the things I like the most about JavaScript, and PHP also to some extent, is how flexible and expressive they CAN...
• 4 min read
When developers talk about the infrastructural boundaries or external dependencies they often talk about databases and third-party integration. They're the first thing we'll put behind an interface so we can stub them out during our tests. This gives us some control over them. It's become relatively easy to spot these dependencies because we do it frequently. They're the usual suspects....
• 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...
• 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,...
• 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. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------...
• 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...
• 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...
• 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...
• 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...