When the new requirement arrives, does this mean we cram it in the best place, making our software more difficult to work with, or might we have ways to make the result cleaner than before we started? We’ll take advantage of Martin Fowler’s concept of Preparatory Refactoring.

As developers, it’s very important to identify our weaknesses in order to strengthen our defenses. Learning how to do this earlier on in our careers will help sustain us into the future.

Last month, we created “role-based lookups” with “When You Know the Pattern.” Database-related code can be difficult to unit test, and once unit tests are written, they can be difficult and time-consuming to maintain. This month we’ll carefully look at this problem and possible solutions. We’ll walk through the test suite after extensive refactoring to […]

There are a lot of things you can say about PHP and trust me a lot has been said about PHP, but the one thing you can not say is that it hasn’t proven itself. PHP has grown with the internet itself and has the battle scars to show for it.

Software design patterns provide a “voice of experience” that can help solve the problem you’re trying to solve. However, it’s often not obvious how to implement any such design pattern within our modern PHP ecosystem. Here’s an example solution. We are implementing a memoizing Registry that’s outside my CakePHP framework code but uses CakePHP’s database […]

Happy New Year from everyone at PHP Architect. We genuinely hope you had a wonderful holiday season and are ready to do great things in 2022. We also hope that we have a small part in making 2022 great for you.

We begin our implementation of Domain-Driven Design with simple refactoring. We’ll take a close look at what complexity might be hidden within the expected implementation. That observation will guide us in refactoring toward Domain-Driven Design. by Edward Barnard

There’s a strong tendency toward “gatekeeping” right now in the 2020s. Senior developers warn “there be dragons” while announcing a “hands-off” policy toward the crucial areas of the codebase. You and I need to get past that. Where’s the fun when you can’t touch the dragons? The joy’s in experiencing software development, dragons and all. […]