Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Swagger spec is an awesome tool for describing APIs in a standardized way, allowing programs to understand and interpret them. It is a set of files (often just one) written in JSON or yaml that defines the routes, parameters, responses, and metadata of an API. After a spec has been written it can be…
Creating test doubles, or mocks, is a feature of PHPUnit that I recently discovered and am quickly falling in love with. Previously I would find other ways to mock my system, like creating SQLite connections instead of a persistent database, or even duplicating an entire mock class for injection.…
Last year I started building out domain repositories in order to encapsulate the data retrieval for my website. They were easy to build, straightforward to implement, and simple to test. At the time all of the data retrieval was through a standard sql database, so all I had to do was pass in a…
Back in 2009 I was working at a company in De Pere called SparkNET. I was still a fresh developer then, just getting used to working with a team and building on modern web framework principles. One of the tools that they introduced was a profiler from Particletree that kept track of simple…
Unit testing is something that I'm still rough around the edges with. I don't do it nearly enough at work and never really pushed myself to pick it up on the side. With my core site refactor, though, it seemed like a good time to wander into testing. And it made a lot of sense to write unit tests…
In my previous post about anonymous functions I mentioned that PHP 5.3 brought in some sweet semantic improvements. Namely, the release introduced the __invoke method and Closure class. Everytime you create a new anonymous function you are actually creating an instance of Closure, and when you…
Anonymous functions have enjoyed a long history with PHP. Well, some version of anonymous functions. PHP 4, released in the long-ago of 2000, had several functions that required the passing in of callbacks, including usort, array_map, and array_walk. To use these you could pass in a callable by name…
I haven't been too many conferences. DealerFire only pushed vendor conferences, fancy get-togethers in cities like Miami and Las Vegas where we all rubbed elbows with industry leaders and vied for customer attention. When I found out that Blue Door Consulting, my current place of employment, wanted…
In an effort to streamline and homogenize code a number of design patterns and best practices have sprung up in the programming field. One of the ideas that has moved across programming disciplines is the vilification of long strands of meandering logic, or called spaghetti code. For many in the…
PHP was the first programming language that I understood fluently. Sure, I had dabbled in BASIC, Java, ActionScript (3.0 is pretty awesome), and a few others, but PHP was the first language that I felt truly comfortable with. It wasn't until I moved onto JavaScript that I started to understand a…