Some time ago I started working on an existing project, so I read the documentation before diving in. At the top of the contributing.md file there was this sentence: “Abstract when possible”. Quickly I learned the project contained more abstract classes than a normal project. This leads to too...
After Laracon US in Louisville, Kentucky, a few weeks ago it was time for Laracon EU this week. For the third time in a row this great conference happened in Amsterdam. Last year I went to the conference and gave a talk at the community day on the day before...
Return type hinting is great! When I use my IDE and experiment with classes that I haven’t used before, I really love that it tells me what kind of object a method returns to me. My IDE doesn’t use Artificial Intelligence to know that, it reads the PHP...
SDKs I like using SDKs when I’m creating prototypes. It’s super easy to get started. You copy and paste some code samples, fill in the minimal configuration needed and there you have it: your first response from the service you’re checking out. In a world where most...
A couple of weeks ago we started a closed beta for Changehub, so it’s a good time to give an introduction to this tool and talk about its history and origin. What does it do Changehub is a tool that turns pull requests written in the keepachangelog format into...
With PHP you can, next to handling HTTP requests, invoke scripts from the command line. For a typical web application this could be used to run database migrations, insert data into the database from fixtures or seeders, repetitive tasks run by cron, clear the cache (cache:clear), general admin stuff…...
Laravel is awesome. Not just the framework, but its ecosystem. Let me walk you through it and show some of the beauties arround this community. Not just a fullstack framework First of all, I have to say that I don’t participate as much as I want online, but I...
Our previous blog post covered tips on code style fixing while working on legacy projects. The blog post was very generic and the ideas are applicable to projects in any language. I mentioned some tips that help your peer developers review your pull requests. What I didn’t mention are...
Legacy projects Old projects (maybe even 6 months or less) often come without test suites, are tightly coupled with an outdated version of a framework (if not: has lots of boilerplate code), and are written without consistency in code style. When working on such a project, it’s tempting to...
