If you’re reading this, you’ve probably noticed that many software development teams got stuck in a swamp of “agile” tools, useless processes and bloated frameworks. In their search for higher productivity, they forgot the importance of real human interaction and technical excellence. Corporate managers and employees are conservative and avoid experiments if they can. This…
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Dependency management traditionally has been one of the weak spots of Go. Knowing that Google internally is using a monorepo, this didn’t seem much of a surprise. Various techniques like using a vendor directory and tools like dep evolved to solve the issue. Go 1.11 finally comes with (experimental) module support and the good news…
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Be honest: Does the number of followers on platforms like Twitter matter to you? Even if you’re above average, there’s always room for more. Social media makes it very easy to compare your own profile and influence with that of others by design. We’re witnessing the effects of the attention economy. Attention is a scarce…
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Since I’m not going to church, I need to write things down in my blog to let go. Probably every freelancer knows this: You’re being contacted by recruiters that want to sell you a permanent position at their amazing company. So, how amazing can it be? Let’s see. First of all some facts. As a freelancer…
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Today, I’ve been evaluating popular hosted CI services to see how well they’re working with PHP and how much they cost. drone.io https://drone.io/ drone.io is free for Open Source projects (one concurrent build). Paid plans for private repositories start at 25 $ / month. Builds are configured on the Web site. PHP support is marked…
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There’s some confusion in the community concerning the use of mocks for unit testing. Mocking is creating objects that simulate the behaviour of real objects. I personally don’t mock class dependencies by default but use real objects and test doubles via dependency injection. Despite the success of this approach, many developers are still plagued by concerns that the…
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This is a follow-up on Why I’m using a separate layer for input data validation that explains the key differences between client-side, input value (form) and model validation. In general, model validation operates on trusted data (internal system state) and should ideally be repeatable at any point in time while input validation explicitly operates once on…
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While some developers seem to prefer to implement their user data validation rules directly in the model layer (or even worse, the ORM entity layer), this very often leads to problems as described by Stefan Priebsch in his blog post on How to Validate Data. In addition to the many issues he mentioned, you should consider the following…
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I just stumbled upon a question concerning Symfony 2 bundles and testability that I want to share with you. When developing with Symfony, beginners tend to use lots of existing bundles, because this seems to be the recommend way of building an application. Later, they wonder, why it’s so hard to write unit and component tests or they write functional…
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If you own a software company or work there in HR, it is your goal to hire the best engineers for your business. So you certainly don’t want to mess up the recruitment process. As someone who’s in the industry for two decades (sitting on both sides of the table), I would like to share…
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