Qafoo GmbH - passion for software quality
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:Author: 		www-data
:Date:			Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:07:55 +0100
:Copyright:		All rights reserved

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PHP Hypertext Processor
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- Common Bottlenecks in Performance Tests

  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?

- Using Mink in PHPUnit

  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.

- Launching the Tideways Company

  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.

- Why Architecture Matters

  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?

- Testing Effects of Commands With Phake::capture()

  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.

- Teaching and Learning Domain-Driven Design without Patterns

  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…

- Analyze the Quality Of Your PHP Code

  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…

- Developers Life is a Trade-Off

  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.

- Utilize Dynamic Dispatch

  A while ago I replied to the tweet by @ramseyTraits are a nice way to
  provide common functionality to unrelated classes without using static
  methods on a global Util class.withWhich 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.

- Testing Micro Services

  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.