If your application’s stability depends on the availability of a third-party system, the reliability of that external system becomes critical to the smooth operation of your own. The circuit breaker pattern is a proven way to protect against an unstable system causing problems with yours. Use it, and you won’t be surprised by an unplanned […]

Sometimes, I need to write experimental code in order to explore and understand how the system works. This is particularly true when dealing with third-party software. Sometimes those experiments become large with many thousands of lines of “experimental” code. Here are my principles and guidelines for making that experimental code a success.

The applications that we build are usually portals for users to view and manipulate data. That data may be as simple as a web page pulled from a database or a collection of raw data. An admin section may display graphs of various analytical data on one page, while another may show configuration data.

In our last issue, we plotted a list of compass directions onto a grid to determine a destination x,y point. In this article, we look at generating a simple output for a colored grid.

Sometimes, SOLID can be a bit hard (no pun intended) to follow because we can’t even notice what we are doing wrong, especially with the Liskov Substitution Principle, as it can be very theoretical. In part two, we look at another, more practical approach for writing solid code.

PHP 8 is a significant release for much more than just its version number: it’s absolutely packed with shiny new language features, potential performance improvements, and fixes to many unintuitive behaviors and inconsistencies in previous iterations of the language.

Listen to Eric, John, and Oscar discuss the articles in the November 2020 issue, SOLID Foundations Topics Covered OSMI 2020 Mental Health in Tech Survey. Practical uses for scalar type hints in PHP. SOLID principles for programming. The peculiarities of floating point math and handling money calculations as a result. Using locks to prevent race […]

Domain Events are one of the mainstays of modern Domain-Driven Design. They’re powerful, simple, useful. However, when developing them, we need to consider infrastructure. We’ll examine the need for explicit database transactions, view a table design, and provide a way to do our future selves a favor!

Many of the applications that we write need to access some form of resource. These resources may come in the form of images we need to display, logs we need to write, or external services we need to pull data from. But, at the end of the day, our applications are accessing things outside of […]

In our last issue, pruned a set of directions to remove values that cancel each other out. It was an exercise in cleaning data, an often crucial step before importing it or processing it elsewhere. In this article, we look at plotting those directions on a grid.