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Scott Keck-Warren
Scott Keck-Warren is the Directory of Technology at WeCare Connect and has been working professionally as a PHP developer for over a decade, as well as leading technical teams. Scott blogs about topics for PHP developers at http://thisprogrammingthing.com.
Articles
Learning By Battling Snakes?
By Scott Keck-Warren
As developers, there’s constantly some new and exciting tool, technique, or package that we **should** be learning. If you’re anything like me, every couple of months, you create a new Git repository, install the latest packages, and start on a brand new side project, only to get bored as you have to write a user registration system for the umpteenth time. What if I told you there was a way to learn and experiment in a fun way? by Scott Keck-Warren
Published in Lounging Around with PHP, November 2024
Finite-state Machines with PHP 8.1
By Scott Keck-Warren
Keeping track of the state of entities in our application can be a real pain sometimes. This article will show how to use Finite-state Machines to ease that pain. by Scott Keck-Warren
Published in The State of PHP, October 2022
Backups For Beginners
By Scott Keck-Warren
Backups are one of those things we developers don’t like to think about until there’s a problem, and then it’s too late. Anyone who’s ever accidentally deleted something only to find out the only good backup is weeks or months old can tell you how important it is that we always have backups as part of our disaster recovery plan. We can’t let them slip because not having a functioning backup can cost our companies untold hours and thousands of dollars recreating data. The worse part is apologizing to our users that their data is gone.
Published in World Backup Day, March 2022
What I Wish Someone Told Me About SQL Database Design
By Scott Keck-Warren
As shocking as this may be, not every team has a dedicated database administrator. I’ve never worked on a team that has had someone solely focused on making sure our queries are performant, and our tables are structured perfectly with all the forms of normalization being applied. Like many developers, I have had to learn difficult lessons about database design the hard way when under a lot of pressure to get something that’s broken fixed. In this article, we will go over how to normalize our database, how to use indexes to improve our performance and discuss using constraints to make sure that the data entered into our database follows our business rules. Knowing these three things will make our lives as developers who also administer databases easier.
Published in Decrypting Cryptography, October 2021
Boosting User Perceived Performance with Laravel Horizon
By Scott Keck-Warren
Work queues allow us to perform slow or error-prone tasks outside of the current user’s request to improve their experience with our site. Instead of doing everything during a user’s request, we can offload expensive tasks like resizing images, sending emails, and generating PDFs. In this article, you’ll learn how we can use Laravel Horizon to speed up the response time for our applications.
Published in Trimming One’s Sails, August 2021
Getting Started With Test-Driven Development
By Scott Keck-Warren
As developers, we spend a large portion of our time testing code we’ve just written. In a traditional testing cycle, we write some code and manually test it until it’s error-free, but how do we know it will be error-free a year from now? Embracing Test-Driven Development (TDD) allows us to quickly build a suite of automated tests, which improves the maintainability and reliability of our code.
Published in Warp Driven Development, July 2020
