Let’s build your new development home Some years ago I was using Ubuntu. It was easy to install and easy to use. I mostly used Windows in my computing life and Unity was feeling similar. At least to me. It was not perfect though: Weird display bugs was popping from time to time. I always felt Unity pretty slow. I had to compile manually a lot of applications not available in the official repositories. »
It’s 2am. Your eyes are tired, you know you’re coding nonsense but you can’t look away from your computer. With a shacking hand you catch a bottle containing a mix of sugar and caffeine. This horrible bug in your code won’t let you in peace till you destroy it. You spent five hours non stop on it. But still, you don’t see the end of the nightmare. Your bed call you, but you don’t listen. »
Oh no! Your boss asked you to fix a bug which crash the company’s website on production. As quick as a jaguar you open the classes responsible of the maelstrom. They were coded by Dave, your colleague developer. The classes are full of formatting errors, poor indentation and weird one letter variables. There are so many dependencies you need to scroll down for minutes to escape the bloated constructor. »
I know what you are thinking: “Again a boring article on DRY? Don’t we have enough already?”. You might be right. However I see too many developers (junior or senior) applying DRY like they are doing some witch hunting. Totally randomly or everywhere they can. So apparently we never have enough DRY principle articles on Internet. A little reminder for those in the back who don’t follow: the DRY principle means “Don’t Repeat Yourself” and was first introduced in the The Pragmatic Programmer. »
What are the pitfalls to avoid with this new version of PHP and its new functionalities? As my previous article on PHP 7 scalar and return types pitfalls, instead of describing the new super cool features of this perfect PHP 7.2, I will describe what can be dangerous for the good health of your application. As Ward Cunningham stated it: “You know you are working on clean code when each routine you read turns out to be pretty much what you expected. »