Normally, when I write unit tests, I don’t use Laravel’s facade and fakery methods. I do a lot of injection of services, but in one particular case, when working with the Queue system, I had to use the facade for faking the queue and asserting some jobs were pushed. (more…)

If you’re not using Swagger (or OpenAPI) yet to document your APIs, you should start. It’s pretty simple to get started - especially in PHP. I recommend using the swagger-php package - it’s pretty easy. Just use annotations, and then generate the Swagger definition when you’re done. (more…)

The real reason we’re not successful or getting a bunch of sales, is because we’re missing feature X, Y and Z! Add them immediately! (more…)

Have you ever submitted a debug log for a piece of desktop software? I’m always enthralled at the sheer amount of information that is included in some of these error reports. It reminds me that I don’t do enough logging. As a matter of fact, I think most PHP developers don’t do enough logging. (more…)

Today, while trying to think of a clever way to create a “hire Aaron” page (yup, resume is right here), I came up with an idea to animate a Google Street View page. My initial goal was to animate a rotation and some travel down a road, but I’ve been unable to find a more seamless way of doing the horizontal travel. It looks like there is just going to be jumps in their photography... (more…)

I’m a huge fan of the service architecture paradigm - and that means that I use services in my controllers to handle persistence. I wanted to abstract the add and update methods from my services and put them into an abstract class. In addition, I didn’t want to have to specify the exact method - I just wanted to call save on the entity. Finally, I wanted to log it properly and verbosely. (more…)

I love namespaces in PHP as much as the next programmer - but there’s always been something about namespaces in my own applications that bothered me. And that’s when I have similar or identical named services, forms, entities or models. (more…)

One of the things that was really bothering me when I first started using Gearman was my consistently failing doctrine database connection. (more…)

I use Vagrant for most of my server management. One thing I noticed is that my Vagrantfile can get pretty large - especially if I have multiple environments that share the same configuration. (more…)

I can’t help but think a lot of PHP applications have a problem. These beautifully crafted, object oriented, highly engineered applications are still making one vital mistake. And that’s using one of the various templating libraries or languages that PHP has. (more…)