A couple of weeks ago I spent a weekend in a rented cottage in Putten. The main reason for heading there was the annual beach pull, a bunch of tuned tractors pulling too much weight. All in all it was a very nice weekend. When we were at the reception I saw the Dutch and […]
One of the main advantages of developing with scriptable tooling is that they sometimes give you nice presents. While doing some research for a future article, I came across a composer post-checkout hook. The picture below displays very nicely how this works. When you change branches there is a chance that you have different dependencies, […]
There are a lot of legacy applications out there without unit-tests. It would be very nice to have them, especially when you’re asked to fix a bug there. So, how can you start unit testing legacy applications? Lets start with a simple mantra. Test one unit at a time. These are unit-tests after all. There […]
A lot of nice stuff is happening in the PHP ecosystem right now. In this case I’m not talking about the PHP 5.5 RC3 that was released lately, since that will take a bit more time to be released, let alone be available for the world to use. I’m talking about the Symfony 2.3 release, […]
Yesterday I was invited with a colleague to join the Agile event 7 at the Arrows Group. The speakers were very interesting, Maarten Hoppen and Jeff Sutherland. Jeff Sutherland is one of the inventors of scrum, so I was eager to go. For the people that think he’s that means he’s the inventor of this… […]
The Symfony2 form component has a very nice way of validating: using annotations. These validation annotations give you the ability to annotate one or more invariants in the documentation of the properties of your class. These are automatically read and validated! Talking about up-to-date documentation. You can describe invariants like this in your entities: Since […]
This follow-up of debugging mindset goes into real life debugging. By now you know the perfect debugging mindset: curious, humble and suspicious. Debugging consists of understanding the problem, reproducing it, finding the problem, finding the right place to fix it and to perform some after-care. Understanding the problem The first preparation you want to make […]
Today I was looking to enable comment moderation shortcuts for my WordPress blog. Obviously I love good comments, and will approve any that are not obviously spam. Manually clicking every comment takes a lot of time though, and the amount of spam messages have been slowly but steadily rising. At the same time I prefer […]
A short story about merging arrays in PHP. When merging two arrays you’ll probably look at array_merge first. These two sentences in the docs say the following: If the input arrays have the same string keys, then the later value for that key will overwrite the previous one. Values in the input array with numeric […]
Debugging is a large part of Software Engineering, and it’s really important to have the right debugging mindset. Debugging itself is a wide subject. It’s something you think everyone knows, but in the real world everyone has to reinvent the wheel themselves. It starts like this: There is a problem with my code, and I […]