Comments? You can comment on this post on my Mastodon post for "It's All About The Data" ... What should I use? Objects. There are two reasons. An obvious reason - and then the actual reason that is more subtle - and is the best reason to use objects (pretty much everywhere). Objects use less memory If you …

Comments? You can comment on this post on my Mastodon post for "It's All About The Data" ... and arrays aren't great for data In my career so far (now over 20 years programming sites with PHP - half of that with Symfony), I've worked on a number of projects that dealt with a great deal of data - a couple of …

Slow running tests are a bug - they stop you from doing as much as you can with your code, & its quality. Spend a little time working on making your tests better, clearer, and faster - and you'll reap rewards from your work. I've had a couple of useful improvements in the time spent running my PHPunit tests …

In early 2016, I suggested an addition to the SncRedis-bundle. The project itself is an fully-featured add-on ('bundle') for Symfony framework projects to easily do a number of very useful interface functions between Symfony and the Redis database/cache. It can, for example, quickly enable all the sessions to be put …

A recent post showed how to setup Code Tombstones - but there are other , even more insidious pieces of code in a project. The code you know you aren't using now, but you wrote ahead of time - because you think it will be useful, or you have plans for it, or any one of a dozen more reasons. Chances are - you might …

While Twitter can be really annoying, sometimes it can help to promote some wonderfully simple ideas. One of these came from Andrew Woods (@awoods) - a github repo called php-in-seattle. It's a simple idea - just a list of companies around a geographical area that use PHP. What it can enable is of mutual advantage to …

Version 0.9 of scheb/tombstone autoloads a file with a tombstone() function. See the bottom of the post for a fix to override that in your own code. In a large project - particularly one in a dynamic language like PHP, as a project gets bigger maintaining full control of the code can be difficult. New features are …

One of the advantages of a side-project is that you can be a little extra passionate about getting things just right. If you want to increase code coverage because you think that it's good, you can - after all, it's just some time now doing things that you like. So, earlier in the year, when I saw Sebastian Bergmann's …

I've previously shown you why you may want to put some tasks through a queuing system, what sort of jobs you could define, plus how to keep a worker process running for as long as you would like (but still be mindful of problems that happen). In this post, I'll show you how to put the messages into the queue, and we'll …

I'm taking a slight diversion now, to show you how the main worker processor runs. There are two parts to it - the actual worker, written in PHP, and the script that keeps running it. For testing with return from the worker, we'll just return a random number. In order to avoid returning a normally used exit value, I've …