Posts tagged with best practices
If you're interested in some dark magic you should watch this talk by Marco Pivetta on Voodoo PHP. I really like these show-me-the-code type of talks.
We've often seen "magic" code, but how does it even work? Let's explore some arguably bad PHP coding techniques that are actually used in real world libraries to solve problems that would otherwise be a huge burden for all of us.
Developers and their employers are often at odds over matters like clean or beautiful code and with good reason: neither ships a product or increases sales. Most end users don’t care what the code looks like, as long as the product works and meets their needs. That means that beautiful code goes out the window when the rubber meets the road and crunch time sets in.http://www.brandonsavage.net/the-case-for-maintainable-code/The fact of the matter is that framing code discussions in terms of beauty or attractiveness doesn’t help the case for getting code that’s clean. But there’s another way to frame the discussion that makes more sense, and achieves both the goal of writing clean code and meets the needs of most businesses: the concept of maintainable code.
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On using a factory versus just newing an object up:
In cases where an object has no dependencies, creating it locally is less of a concern. For example, a DateTime object has no object dependencies (unless you specify timezone, but that’s another matter entirely).http://www.brandonsavage.net/breaking-the-single-responsibility-principle/
We've moved our logic into a trait, a trait can be shared between many controllers without inheritance and it's more reasonable to do things with views and redirects here (though still not ideal). This in my eyes is the best solution to the problem, it's what traits are good for and it's quite convenient.http://tech.graze.com/2015/04/14/sharing-controller-logic-with-traits-in-php/
The article provides a good overview of how the people at Graze came to this solution.
... it’s important to remember that API design isn’t strictly about the practical implications on client and server software. The audience for an API is the developer who is going to consume it. Per the "principle of least astonishment," developers will have an easier time learning and understanding an API if it follows the same conventions as other APIs they’re familiar with.https://blogs.dropbox.com/developers/2015/04/how-many-http-status-codes-should-your-api-use/
Is a million lines of code a lot? How many lines are there in Windows? Facebook? iPhone apps?http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/
Dimitrios Savvopoulos, the creator of the laravel-translatable package (which I use in almost every project), shared a very nice tip on how to develop a package while it is installed as a requirement.
If you have write access to a composer package repository, you have the possibility to continue its development while it is installed as requirement in another project. Let's see how we can accomplish this.http://dimsav.com/blog/9/git-repository-inside-composer-vendors
If you have another, possibly better, way to go about this, let me know in the comments.
Under this scheme, version numbers and the way they change convey meaning about the underlying code and what has been modified from one version to the next.http://semver.org/...
Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:
Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.
- MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
- MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
- PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.
HTTP2 will mean a change in how we should build websites. The best practices of HTTP1 are harmful in a HTTP2 world.https://mattwilcox.net/web-development/http2-for-front-end-web-developers
An old, but still relevant, blogpost by Derick Rethans (of Xdebug fame) about why the @-operator should be avoided.
http://derickrethans.nl/five-reasons-why-the-shutop-operator-should-be-avoided.html
My current hosting provider, DigitalOcean, has a great backup service. It takes frequent snapshots of entire droplets and it's very easy to restore the snapshot quickly. Unfortunately backups are only taken once every week. For our clients this is not acceptable. If you only rely solely on the DO…
In this video Steven Salevan, a site reliability engineer (cool title) for Twitter, explains how they use Ansible to manage thousands of their servers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwGrKXzocg4
http://www.theguardian.com/info/developer-blog/2015/jan/05/delivering-continuous-delivery-continuouslyIn 2011 the Guardian deployed the software behind the website 25 times. It was a laborious and fairly manual process. In 2014 we made more than 24,000 highly automated production deployments. Why and how did we do it?
There are many falsehoods programmers believe about geography, about addresses, about names and about time.
This survey downloaded CSS files from over 8,000 domains and aggregated some data about how CSS is being used and written. I think this can be useful to drive conversations forward about how to organize, think about, and manage larger CSS projects, as well as to look at how the web is evolving.http://reports.quickleft.com/css
A repository is a collection, a collection that holds entities and which can filter and return entities back based on the needs of your application. How it actually holds those entities is an implementation detail.http://shawnmc.cool/the-repository-pattern
A clear and concise explanation of the repository pattern.
For projects with a long life expectancy, investing in your test suite is well worth it. Proper automated testing is a careful balance. Quickly introduce tests when you need them, and build a comprehensive, fast, and reliable test suite in the long run. We hope this post can give you some ammunition to win your team to this idea.http://everzet.com/post/107204911916/economy-of-tests
Here's a big list of things to be aware of when switching an http site over to https. Ignore the bit about social buttons, just don't use them.
CodeIgniter 3.0 will support PHP 5.2. Anthony Ferrara wrote an interesting article on his blog why that's a very bad thing.
http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/12/on-php-version-requirements.html