What’s the difference between pitching for new programmers to join the team vs investors to fund it? Nothing. If you’ve not been pitching both of them with equal detail and vigor, you’re missing out. (more…)

I wrote instructions in 2011 to add a PHPUnit Listener to Watch for Long Running Tests which seem to be a bit out of date now. But, here’s a quick refresher: (more…)

This isn’t a one-size-fits-all suggestion, but it’s a start to help you think about how you actually interact with factories in Laravel. They are used for test data, and are ran very often, multiple times in a row. You don’t need as much random information as you need. (In fact, a lot of times I see people overusing Faker even.) (more…)

You’ve heard the saying before: “Fake it till you make it.” I agree with this philosophy - especially when it comes to getting a great programming job. But, I think the way you ‘fake’ it is important. It’s important to fake it ethically. Let’s discuss. (more…)

For testing, I tend to use Postman - which gives you the option to view your API JSON responses in a preview mode (interactive), pretty and raw. But, the other day I heard someone saying sometimes they just want to invoke pretty print in their JSON responses without having to use an external tool and set up a whole environment. (more…)

I’m a huge fan of code review and code walkthroughs. I’ve been asked before what I look for while reviewing code but I don’t know if I’ve ever addressed ways to pick out what code to actually review. (more…)

I’ve used the anonymous self-executing paradigm a few times in JavaScript over the years. Something like this: (more…)

I’ve migrated the website 33thingsbook.com to this blog post. (more…)

It’s hard to come up with a title for this - but - basically I found some rogue code the other day that I thought was pretty interesting. I was fixing a “hacked” website when I came across the source of the symptoms of the hack. One file had the following code in it: (more…)

There’s a reason why we want to build high-quality code - actually there are man. But in the end, it boils down to this one point. Good Quality Code Reduces Costs. (more…)