As developers, we need to automate as much as possible. This saves us time and money as well as keeps us from skipping steps. I used to have a project where I would run my tests manually before I push them into production. It started out taking 1 to 5 minutes and that was fine because I could just start the test running and get a warm cup of coffee. But eventually, it grew and grew until it was 30 minutes and that was just too long for me to sit around and wait for my tests to pass. I started to skip running the tests which lead to a test suite I couldn’t trust. The solution is to run automate ..read more

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 tables are structured perfectly with all the forms of normalization being applied. I, like a lot of developers, have had to learn difficult lessons about database design the hard way by constantly learning from my mistakes. In this article, we’re going to go over how to normalize our database. Knowing normalization will make our lives as developers who also administer databases easier by reducing code duplication. Normalization One of the concepts that ..read more

When my twins were born in 1998, I was 28 and working in the water purification industry. Despite the manual labor, I enjoyed the science and math involved, made great friends, and had a stable job with great pay. I was not a professional developer. The post Getting TEKnical appeared first on php[architect ..read more

John and Eric share more of the day to day behind the scenes work that goes on at php[architect]. This includes a lot of talk on php[tek]. They also talk about the latest edition of the magazine “Box of PHP”. Join the Discord at https://phpa.me/discord Get your early bird php[tek] tickets before the price goes up at https://tek.phparch.com   Subscribe to the Magazine Today https://phpa.me/signup Join us at php[tek] 2023 php[tek] 2023 Twitter @phparch @phptek @johncongdon @shocm Mastodon phparch.social@editor phparch.social@tek phparch.social@john phparch.social@eric The post php[podca ..read more

Sharing ideas has a weird side effect that people don’t often discuss. With in-person events starting back up, we finally took the opportunity to restart our local user group, SDPHP. I highly encourage everyone to find a local community to be a part of, learn from, talk to, and share ideas with. The post Box of PHP appeared first on php[architect ..read more

One of the more annoying problems when working with data is creating a system to save data from RAM into long-term storage so it can be loaded back into RAM and processed at a later time. There are thousands of different file formats that allow us to take structured data, write it to storage, and then read from it again. Wouldn’t it be great if we could do the same thing with our classes so we could save their state and then restore them to the same state? Most programming languages provide some kind of support to do this and PHP is no exception. In this article, we’ll be discussing how to se ..read more

Onboarding a new developer to our team can be a complicated process. They need to fill out HR paperwork, get a development environment, and find a comfy place to work (along with a caffeinated beverage). Then someone needs to fill their head with all of the institutional knowledge they need to do their job. There are lots of ways to do this but one of the ways I prefer is to code with another developer at the same time using pair programming. In this article, we’ll discuss what pair programming is, how to do it, and the benefits and drawbacks of the process. ## What is Pair Programming? Pair ..read more

 Join the Discord at https://phpa.me/discord Get your early bird php[tek] tickets before the price goes up at https://tek.phparch.com   Subscribe to the Magazine Today https://phpa.me/signup Join us at php[tek] 2023 php[tek] 2023 Twitter @phparch @phptek @johncongdon @shocm Mastodon phparch.social@editor phparch.social@tek phparch.social@john phparch.social@eric The post php[podcast] Episode 23.2.1 appeared first on php[architect ..read more

The post Knowledge Crunching appeared first on php[architect ..read more

One of the most powerful parts of writing web applications in the modern era is how we can quickly create an application that does a lot with just a little bit of our code by using open-source packages. Have you ever wanted to contribute a package to the community for others to use? Maybe you want to modify an existing package for your personal use. If you have, you’re in luck because, in this article, we’ll discuss how we can create a package and list it on Packagist so anyone can use it in their project. Getting Started First of all, we need to pick a package name. I know, I know, naming th ..read more