
New PHP 8 language features that you may have missed
PHP has gained a lot of new language features over the years. Some of them are frankly a bit insane – but in a good way.
PHP has gained a lot of new language features over the years. Some of them are frankly a bit insane – but in a good way.
Pull request bots can provide both maintainers and contributors with a lot of useful information, but sometimes less is more.
When all you have is a relational database, everything looks like a table. And you know what? It works! Sort of.
Proactive detection of NIO tests makes it possible to fix flaky tests before they ever cause any problems.
In today’s “Things That People Don’t Want To Bother With” blog we’re having a look at commit messages and how to write them.
It’s technically possible to make Eloquent models inherit from each other, but I probably wouldn’t recommend it.
This catalogue of 79 bad smells can help you make your continuous integration processes less shitty.
In this latest instalment of “Things That People Don’t Want To Bother With” I discuss best practices for writing comments in source code.
How many unit tests are enough? As always the answer is “It depends”, but fortunately there is a handy rule of thumb that you can use!
Tests can be written Chicago-style or London-style. Neither is strictly better than the other; which style should you use?
The best time to make your software testable was at the start of the project. The second best time is now.
Arrange-Act-Assert is a standardised approach to writing tests that makes them easier to read and helps you avoid some bad practices.
None, because tabs are better than spaces! Joking aside, it appears that the exact number doesn’t matter that much.
Developers often complain about technical debt, but how much does it really hurt the business? According to this study it’s *a lot*.
Let’s talk about architecture erosion, its causes and consequences, and how developers can identify and control it.
There aren’t many reasons why you should choose snake_case over camelCase, but the ones that are there are pretty convincing.
Does it matter whether you use camelCase or snake_case for identifiers? Yes it does! Probably. Maybe.
If you want to study the effect of something on the understability of code, you need a controlled experiment. What are things to do or avoid?
This study attempts to provide a more nuanced answer than “JavaScript”, from an educator’s perspective.
Relational databases are very good at storing tabular data, but what if you need to store arbitrarily-sized trees?
The Dutch have a lot of long words that aren’t in dictionaries. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re hard to read for Dutch people.
We are often told that variable names should be meaningful and avoid abbreviations, yet some variables are simply named “k”. What gives?
Numbers produced by technical debt tools tell a tale, but it’s largely fictional.
This study gives us a better understanding of the practical problems faced by developers when using regular expressions.