PHP Quality Tools – magic number detector

Inspired by the AUTM conference, I got inspired to look at some of the common processes techtransfer folks do. Main idea was to try to develop something relatively ‘standalone’ that might address a use case I learned about, so I decided on building a web-based open source techfinder tool to publish licensable technologies. The notion…

I stumbled on an article from Matt Galligan about the initial versions of Cir.ca, a news aggregator app from a few years ago that recently closed up. So the article talked about many of the design ideas they had, and the struggles they worked through before changing or abandoning some ideas.  This is an example…

I hit a problem the other day with concurrent queries causing deadlocks.  Using innodb gives you a lot of protection with respect to transaction support, but it carries a moderate amount of overhead, and unless you’re aware of what’s going on, you may be paying a higher price which can eventually cause performance or deadlock…

Have been needing to programmatically fill out an I9 PDF, retrieved from gov site. Should be fairly straightforward, right? Well… the field names are… a mess. Field names like topmostSubform[0].Page1[0].U\.S\._Social_Security_Number__Last_4_numbers_[0]topmostSubform[0].Page1[0].expiration_date__if_applicable__mm_dd_yyyy[0] topmostSubform[0].Page2[0].Employers_Business_or_Organization_Address_Street_Number_and_Name[0] and so on make it pretty… not straightforward to create a usable key/value combination to search and replace. But… today, I noticed it got…

phpinsights is a tool you can use to get a nice overview of the quality state of a PHP project. The tool will analyze the code, complexity, architecture and some code style rules, then present four corresponding scores. Measuring over time will give you a sense of which areas of your code are improving, and…

This has been a thorny issue for a while, and *may* have been resolved in Laravel 9 (have not upgraded projects to 9 yet). Testing both that an email was triggered in a Laravel test, as well as verifying the content of the mail body – that has often seemed to be a tricky step….