We have a really good testing culture at madewithlove and, in one of the projects I am working on, we have a decent suite of tests. A big chunk of these tests are Feature Tests. In this article, I’ll describe the process of switching a project’s test suite...
Most developers are familiar with the concept of imperative and declarative programming. Imperative programming is when you provide the program with the exact steps to achieve the output with an emphasis on how. Declarative programming is a coding style where you focus on what the piece should achieve with less...
This article is an update (2017) of the How to Integrate your Laravel app with Elasticsearch original article from 2015. There is also an updated version of this post (2022): How to Integrate your Laravel app with Elasticsearch – 2022 edition Searching is an important part of many applications, and it...
I’ve been performing a talk on PSR-7 at PHP meetups and conferences. In that talk I demo the use of Guzzle to perform concurrent HTTP requests. Now what happens if you need to perform a large number of concurrent requests? If you don’t control the number of requests...
We all know them, search pages which allow you to filter through vast data sets by checking or unchecking filters. In most cases each filter is followed by a counter which indicates how many results will be shown when you apply that filter. Those counters inform the user about their...
A new tool called Otto came out recently. It’s a tool from Hashicorp. At the project homepage we can see the headline “meet the successor to Vagrant”. I know most of you are familiarized with Vagrant, but for those that are not: Vagrant is a tool to manage virtual...
As far as I can remember, PHP has always had a terrible reputation at handling very heavy (or asynchronous) tasks. For a long while if you wanted to parallelize long tasks you had to resort to forking through pcntl_fork which had its own issues, and you couldn’t really...
If you’ve ever worked on any PHP application, or package, or anything you know that debugging performance issues is hard. There are several ways to ease the pain a little: debug bars, putting timers a bit everywhere. Or if you’re courageous like I was for a long time,...
I like to think of client-side applications as empty shells that get populated with data and where the source of that data can be anything: an object in your javascript code, an HTTP request, a JSON file, … Making sure this data flows correctly through your application is one hell of...