Amazing PHP

​​What is Software Architecture?
When it comes to the definition of Software architecture is the process of transforming software features such as flexibility, scale, viability, reusability, and security into a structured solution that meets technological and business aspirations. This definition refers to the features of the software that can affect software architecture. In addition to technical requirements, a long list of features primarily represents a business or operational needs.

Double Dispatch
The computation of a method call is only dependent on the object receiving the method call. Most of the time that's enough. However, sometimes we need the computation to also depend on the argument being passed to the method call.
Think you have two hierarchies of objects interacting with each other and the computation of these interactions depends on both objects, not only in one of them. Maybe some examples will make this clearer.

​​Writing Clean Code In PHP
In this article, let's learn how to write clean code in PHP. These tips help you to write readable, reusable & refactorable code in PHP.

The Domain Layer - Clean Architecture & Domain-Driven Design on PHP
The fundamental part of Clean Architecture and Domain-Driven Design is the Domain layer. There all the business and applications rules are laid down and will be controlling the processing of information independently from the infrastructure and frameworks.

​​How to connect with gRPC service in PHP application? gRPC PHP tutorial
More and more developers and companies are discovering the benefits of microservices. And while PHP is usually not the first choice for this architecture, it is now more than viable to create efficient web apps based on microservices with PHP. To that end, Google’s gRPC and Protobuf solutions are a big help. Today, I’m going to show you how to use gRPC with PHP.

13 Best Practices for Building RESTful APIs
Facebook, GitHub, Google, and many other giants need a way to serve and consume data. A RESTful API is still one of the best choices in today’s dev landscape to serve and consume data.
But have you ever considered learning about industry standards? What are the best practices for designing a RESTful API? In theory, anyone can quickly spin up a data API in less than five minutes — whether it be Node.js, Golang, or Python.

Fiendish Functions - Filtering Fact From Fiction
Functional programming is a paradigm that has gained in popularity recently with the rise of several new functional programming languages and integration of new features in existing languages. All the same, there are many concerns about functional programming in the developer community. Is functional programming useful for the PHP developer? Will it add complexity to my codebase? This article will respond to some of these misconceptions.

Roadmap to learn Software Design
I have been planning to learn Software Design for a quite a while now but I always ended up finding some other fancy topic. You can be a software engineer with years of experience and still do fine without delving into the meat of Software design but the perks of understanding this complex process are unfathomable.

Object Oriented Done Right
Alan Kay, the inventor of the term “object-oriented programming”, told a story once during a talk more than 20 years ago. You can build a dog house using only a hammer, nails, planks, and just a little bit of skill. I figure even I would be able to build it given enough time. Once you've built it you've earned the skills and know-how, and could apply it to other projects. Next, you want to build a cathedral, using the same approach with your hammer, nails, and planks. It's a 100 times larger, but you've done this before — right? It'll only take a little longer.

Back the func off, this is my abstraction!
Integrating services over API's exposes your application to a range of possible failures. At scale, any network interaction can and will fail. Implementing a retry mechanism is a common approach to increase fault tolerance. Taking into account how systems fail when designing software can greatly improve the quality of your code. In this blogpost I'd like to show how I approach these kinds of problems.

Contract Tests
There is more to the contract of an interface than just the methods it provides. All implementation of this interface actually need to behave consistently in the same situations. This post shows a way how we can test for this.

​​Why GraphQL is Taking Over APIs
A few years ago, I managed a team at DocuSign that was tasked with re-writing the main DocuSign web app which was used by tens of millions of users. The APIs didn’t exist yet to support our new shiny front-end app because since the beginning the web app was a .NET monolith. The API team in Seattle was taking the monolith apart and exposing RESTful APIs slowly. This API team consisted of just two engineers and had a release cycle of one month. Our front-end team in San Francisco released every week. The API team release cycle was so long because a lot of (almost all) the functionality had to be tested manually.

​​Upgrading a Project to PHP 8.0
This article is not about new features or comparative tests; first, we need to update the project to make it compatible with PHP 8.
Today, we are going to draw up a plan for the update and discuss the key potential difficulties based on the example of updating a large project from PHP 7.4 to 8.0. Most of the steps will also be helpful when planning an upgrade from earlier versions.

Do not mock what you do not own
Web applications typically process HTTP requests. Commonly, objects are used to encapsulate request data. Depending on the framework, we may have an interface such as...

​​Data Transfer Object V3 Modernizes DTOs With PHP 8 Features
Spatie's Data Transfer Object (DTO) package makes constructing objects from arrays a breeze, giving you confidence in the data contained therein. I've been a fan of this package since learning about the initial V1 release, and I hope you'll consider this package for passing around data in your application.

Unit testing tips by examples in PHP
In these times, the benefits of writing unit tests are huge. I think that most of the recently started projects contain any unit tests. In enterprise applications with a lot of business logic, unit tests are the most important tests, because they are fast and can us instantly assure that our implementation is correct. However, I often see a problem with good tests in projects, though these tests' benefits are only huge when you have good unit tests. So in these examples, I will try to share some tips on what to do to write good unit tests.

​​100ms -> 40ms -> 1ms: Maximizing response caching in Laravel
How to take (some) response times from 100ms to 40ms to 1ms.

Setup Step Debugging in PHP with Xdebug 3 and Docker Compose
In versions of Xdebug before version 3 setting up step debugging for code inside Docker containers has often been challenging to say the least. However, in version 3 it’s become almost trivial. In this short tutorial, I’ll step you through what you need to do, regardless of the (supported) text editor or IDE you’re using.

​​Does it belong in the application or domain layer?
If you're one of those people who make a separation between an application and a domain layer in their code base (like I do), then a question you'll often have is: does this service go in the application or in the domain layer? It sometimes makes you wonder if the distinction between these layers is superficial after all. I'm not going to write again about what the layers mean, but here is how I decide if a service goes into Application or Domain

Character escape sequences and numeric notations in PHP
Many modern programming languages support various way to use various characters such as simple English Latin characters, numbers, symbols, Emojis, and various special characters such as a new line or a tab character.