Did you know that Skunk Works has a set of rules laid down by its founder? If you aren’t familiar with Skunk Works, it’s a division of Lockheed Martin focusing on rapid completion of impossible projects, moonshots. The founder, Kelly Johnson, has recorded the axioms. Here’s what...
A client project I work on required some processing, scheduled nightly at 2am. I’m a curious creature, by nature, so I was eager to learn what keeps the queues busy for up to 30 minutes in the middle of the night. It must have been something important! The business...
Recruitment was not the easiest business to work in during the first year of the pandemic. The first things that come to mind when thinking about how COVID-19 affected the economy are massive layoffs in various economic sectors, small businesses closing down, and a lot of uncertainty in general. A...
Recently, we were looking into some Laravel PHP8 performance issues we were experiencing on one screen of a web application. This screen would show an aggregation of several statistics across the application and would include things like: * The total number of tickets, grouped by their status (open, closed, …) * The total...
The set up When developing software, you sometimes come up with ideas that in the end don’t really work out. Depending on the idea and on the time spent finding out it’s a bad idea, it can be challenging to turn back the changes. One of those ideas...
I’ve very recently passed a personal milestone in my career. I facilitated my first ever event storm. As with most things you haven’t done before, doing them the first time is a good opportunity to learn. In preparation, I was reading as much as I could on event...
One of the most important things when starting to work on a project is to set up a local development environment. For me, this should have the following requirements: * Easy to install, preferably a one-click/command solution * Reproducible across multiple host machines, by everyone in the team Very often, our...
We all had to do it at some point. We’ve all been in the situation where we needed to add some code — maybe a CLI command — just for a one-off operation. Or maybe the code would be needed just for the next month. We promise ourselves to get back...
As many of you know Laravel provides a concept for dealing with Polymorphism in Eloquent relationships called “Polymorphic Relationships“. It’s a nice abstraction, but if you are not careful it might lead to a lot of type checking at runtime all over the place. There’s nothing wrong with...