Anyone who has read my work knows that I’m a huge fan of automated testing. I’ve preached automated testing ever since Chris Hartjes (Grumpy Programmer) wrote about it years ago. He converted me, and I have been a dutiful, loyal… continue reading
Web developers have long sought ways to make their projects easier to run, maintain and work with. From console apps like Composer and Artisan to custom implementations using things like Symfony Console, there’s a myriad of development tools aimed at… continue reading
I’m not ashamed to admit the fact that I struggle with my mental health. Mental health issues are common among technology professionals. Perhaps this is even more common than in the general population, though I do not have any statistics… continue reading
Everybody loves to make software that is glamorous, beautiful, and amazing. But very few people like doing the grunt work that it takes to get there. Work like devops, deployment, CI/CD pipeline management, project management, and more is required for… continue reading
I started writing PHP in 2003 when I needed to build an online game. While I had intended to use Excel formulas for the game, one of the players didn’t have Excel; this prompted me to learn PHP. Over the… continue reading
It’s 4 am and your servers are down. Your infrastructure provider is having a major outage with no estimated restore time, and your entire application is offline. You’re scrambling, because in two hours your customers come online and will flood… continue reading
Developers like to use booleans as flags. They’re a convenient way to indicate something as on/off, true/false, yes/no. But the problem is that booleans are not clear from calling code exactly what they do. For example: Does anyone in the… continue reading
Most projects announce to some kind of fanfare – some greater than others. We love to see a new open source project released, and we cheer when a new package is available that solves a problem, particularly if it’s a… continue reading
In my last post I talked about linking microservices together inside a single Docker network for easy communication between the services. For web developers, this poses an interesting problem: if we want to access the services from our local machines,… continue reading
In 1978, United Airlines Flight 173 crashed just short of Portland International Airport. Due to a landing gear malfunction, the aircraft was circling the area trying to resolve the issue; the copilot and flight engineer hinted to the pilot as… continue reading