Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Aside from being awesome, Jacob does have a real career. Starting with basic HTML and CSS, he has slowly added more languages and methods and is now a well-rounded web developer. Whether you're looking at advanced server-side optimization, semantic structure, or project team management, Jacob has some good experiences to share.
After spending quite a few years working with services, and, more recently, API gateways, I've become intimately familiar with the desire to add layers and layers of middleware. When a service is initially designed it focuses only on pure functionality - each endpoint offering a unique business…
Over a year ago I made the decision to publish the custom framework behind my personal website. There were a few reasons why I wanted to share the code, though the main driver was that I wanted to actively modernize my code base. And it worked. Since pushing my custom framework I've updated huge…
A few months ago I started building a Swagger resolver library, with the intention of having a parser that understood different inheritance properties of the spec. About halfway through I realized that this library was going to be huge, with dozens of objects, and that it wasn't going to work the…
Middleware is a powerful concept that modern frameworks use to bridge between separate parts of a stack - namely, a HTTP layer and application. A request comes in, is validated/manipulated by middleware, triggers behavior in the application, and then the response goes back out through the same…
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.…
Continuous integration and deployment is one of my favorite parts about working at Shutterstock. The team can push, run automated tests, and deploy many times in a single day. I've been wanting to try to build up something like this for my own projects and, by using a combination of Digital Ocean,…
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…
For the last month or so my team at Shutterstock has been going through a death march. It has negatively impacted my blogging, personal life, and open source contributions. Also, it has only increased my commitment to the company and strengthened our team's dynamic.
So, what is a death march in this…
A problem that I've run into during the unending quest for complete test coverage is mocking of internal PHP functions. Unit tests are easy to write as long as a class method returns everything it does, but when a method starts to call out to certain internal PHP functions things get difficult. It's…