2022
Flysystem 3.0.0 is released
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.
3 min readPHPFlysystem
2021
Back the func off, this is my abstraction!
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.
8 min readPHPSoftware Design
2020
Testing without mocking frameworks.
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.
9 min readPHPTesting
2018
Array destructuring in PHP
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…
3 min readPHPSyntax
Being in control of time in PHP
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.
4 min readPHPTesting
Regaining trust in your test suite with Docker.
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.
3 min readPHPTesting
2017
Partitioning for concurrency in synchronous business processes.
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.
8 min readPHPData Engineering
Battle Log: Symfony Routing performance considerations.
Last week I took a deep dive into Symfony's Routing Component. 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.
7 min readPHPSymfony
2016
Finally, file streams, and deferred execution in PHP.
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.
4 min readPHP
2015
Pipelines, immutability and privates.
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.
3 min readPHP
Packages vs. Components: The Dependency Problem.
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.
6 min readPHP
Rendering ReactJS templates server-side.
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.
7 min readReactJSPHP