Most developers by now internalized that we should not invest time in optimizations before we know what happens exactly. This is true for optimizations in your PHP code but also for optimizations regarding your infrastructure. We should measure before we try to optimize and waste time. How can this be done?
Read more on Common Bottlenecks in Performance Tests…Another day for a short PHPUnit trick. If you want to use PHPunit to control a browser for functional or acceptence tests, then you can easily do this using the Mink library. Mink is well known from the Behat community to facilitate Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD), but it is a standalone library that can be used with PHPUnit just as easily.
Read more on Using Mink in PHPUnit…Today we have a very exciting announcement: Qafoo and I have launched a new company together to turn my side project Tideways into a fully-fledged business.
Read more on Launching the Tideways Company…We experience that the system architectures of our customers grow more and more complex. This is either because of scaling requirements or because developers like to try out new technologies like implementing Microservices. What are the challenges with this and how can we overcome them?
Read more on Why Architecture Matters…Today I want to share a simple trick for the excellent Mocking library Phake (I wrote about it before) when testing state on APIs that don't return values.
Read more on Testing Effects of Commands With Phake::capture()…When development teams start to use Domain-Driven Design (DDD) in work projects, then one or more developers read the blue book by Eric Evans and start to apply patterns such as Entity, Repository, Services and Value Objects. In my experience with teams using DDD it can be very distracting to think in patterns. Read about a more practical way to get started…
Read more on Teaching and Learning Domain-Driven Design without Patterns…In code reviews we often browse metrics, source code and reported code issues together with our customers. This leads to discussions about the current state of the code and possible improvements. First we used a bunch of shells scripts for that. In a second step we developed a simple PHP (Open Source) application helping us to do the job. Now we did the third step and rewrote that application into a React based client side (Open Source) application. Read on for the reasons and benefits…
Read more on Analyze the Quality Of Your PHP Code…At Qafoo, we train a lot of people on topics like object oriented software design, automated testing and more. It happens quite often that an attendee asks questions like "Which is the best solution for problem class $x?", "What is the optimal tool for task $y" or "There is a new technology $z, is that the future of web development?". Some are disappointed when I reply "It depends" or "That does not exist", but that's the truth.There is no silver bullet and one of the most important skills every developer needs to hone is to assess possibilities and to find the best trade-off for the current challenge.To make that point clear I'm giving three examples from my personal experience, some where it went well and some where it did not.
Read more on Developers Life is a Trade-Off…A while ago I replied to the tweet by @ramsey
Traits are a nice way to provide common functionality to unrelated classes without using static methods on a global Util class.with
Which makes them exactly as evil as static access. Funktionality you dispatch to becomes irreplaceable destroying a fundament of OO: Dynamic dispatch.I want to use this blog post to illustrate the concept of dynamic dispatch which I use a lot recently to motivate creating clean OO structures in my trainings. In my experience, this helps people to understand why we want to write code in this way. After that I will show why traits are bad in this direction. Read more on Utilize Dynamic Dispatch…
I recently had a short exchange with Ole Michaelis on Twitter about how to end-to-end test micro services. Since I didn't have time to make my whole case, Ole suggested that I blog about this, which I'm happily doing now.
Read more on Testing Micro Services…