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.

By Chris Tankersley There is a huge emphasis put on the code maintainability, and for a good reason. The programming industry is rife with what we like to term “legacy code,” which boils down to code that solves a business problem, but we, as the current maintainers, do not understand. No language is safe from […]

By Chris Tankersley Recently, we’ve discussed principles for writing clean code in your php applications. Testing is a valuable technique to help you produce and maintain a codebase, but it can be daunting to learn. In this article, we’ll start with unit testing. Let’s look at how tests help during the design phase and in […]

The larger the pull-request you submit, the longer it takes to review, and the less valuable the review holds. Moreover, to spend several days on feedback, fixes, repeated reviews, approval, and merging is laborious and not very pleasant. How do we avoid such situations? How can we streamline reviewing our requests, allowing them to be […]

All developers know bugs are bad and finding them can be difficult. The good news is tools to help us find and prevent bugs are becoming more powerful. This article shows how to use advanced static analyzers on your current project to help you produce cleaner, bug-free code.

Legacy code is an unfortunate fact every developer has to face. Whether you subscribe to the idea that legacy code is just inherited code, untested code, or that it’s code which has reached a certain age, the grim reality of software development is that code lives, for a very long time. See how to tombstone […]

Development teams use code review as a way to keep track of one another’s progress on issues and tasks in the work queue. Code reviews are also a stellar way to proactively detect and address security concerns before they become critical to the success of the project.

Continuing our series on the sins of programming, I want to touch on the sin of gluttony in programming. (And no, I don’t mean to infer anything about the size of our waists.) Over the years, over decades, we have continued to add layers of complexity to our code, under the auspices of making it […]

This month we’re going to dive into PhpStorm and cover configuration from personal preferences to obeying standards and day to day usage. We’ll see how to use the features of an IDE to improve your productivity and the quality of your code.

When I made the transition from hobbyist to professional programmer, I discovered it isn’t enough for my code to work; it also has to be easy to maintain. At first, I wasn’t sure how to make it happen. Then, when I read Robert Martin’s book *Clean Code*, I discovered good code is written with people […]