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Reduce input of functions to improve readability

Reduce input of functions to improve readability

One of the elements we evaluate when reading a function call are the parameters given to it. To understand what's happening inside (not how, just what) it's necessary to see the relevant data as part of the function call. Counterintuitiv, this sometimes means to increase the amount of parameters or

Where and how to use abstraction

Where and how to use abstraction

Abstraction is one if the first things a developer learns when starting programming. It's repeated again and again from "Clean Code" to every other introduction book. It's so ingrained, that we don't really question why. As most developers I also started to use abstraction everywhere. Abstraction as a goal in

Delete JSON property in Postgres

Delete JSON property in Postgres

When migrating JSON data in Postgres, it's often necessary to delete properties within a JSON object. There's a neat operator for it #-. In this example the property comment was stored as an empty string instead of the property just missing. So we delete the property for all domain messages

Beware of adding or subtracting a month from DateTime

Beware of adding or subtracting a month from DateTime

When subtracting a month from 31.03.2022, what should be the result? There isn't really a "right" answer, because it's kind of an invalid query without additional context. Do you want to receive the end of the previous month? Do you want to subtract the amount of days of

Remove unnecessary polyfills from composer

Remove unnecessary polyfills from composer

Frameworks like Symfony and packages include a lot of polyfills. Not just for extensions but also for older PHP versions. It's not really a bad thing, I use it myself in one of my packages. As far as I'm aware, having them installed has no measurable performance impact. But it's

Working with time

Working with time

When working with time in general, there are a few concepts that can be used and might make sense. There are "dates", "time of day" and "moments in time". Unfortunately PHP only contains one construct (DateTime) to handle "moments in time" but nether "dates" nor "time of day". But where

Reduced complexity in HandlerWrapper of CQRS bundle

Reduced complexity in HandlerWrapper of CQRS bundle

Two days ago I released a new version (0.5.0) of the CQRS bundle for Symfony. It contains the following changes. Reduced complexity in the HandlerWrapper Previously the HandlerWrapper contained 4 steps: * prepare * catch * then * finally When looking through the implementations, I realized that there are no cases that

Package for Id and IdList value objects with Symfony

Package for Id and IdList value objects with Symfony

Just recently I wrote about how I handle ids and id lists as value objects in my projects. Shortly after, I realised that the version I'm using isn't the same in all the projects and decided to streamline them and move them into an open source id package for Symfony

Using id value objects for better readability and type safety

Using id value objects for better readability and type safety

When I stared my development career, the usual identifiers for any entity was an unsigned integer. After a while this was replaced by UUIDs which limit the amount of syncing necessary and meant that it's possible to fill an entity with all data including the id without the help of

Explicit code to reduce cost of change

Explicit code to reduce cost of change

I came to realize that most problems (bugs, higher costs of change, wrong estimations) in the projects I'm involved with, where due to implicit logic in the business domain. What do I mean with implicit logic in the business domain? Things like the following: class ProjectController { public function updateProject( Project

Using CQRS in Symfony

Using CQRS in Symfony

Symfony is really great for building APIs very fast. Especially when using a CRUD / REST methodology. Simply because there are a lot of resources and tools build-in (API platform, request parameter converter, dependency injection into controller methods, ...). There is not that much support for building apps with CQRS. On the

Overwrite APP_ENV in PHPUnit

Overwrite APP_ENV in PHPUnit

Important when you're using something like Docker where you inject the env variables directly into the environment rather than just pulling them from a .env file with a PHP dotenv component. Make sure to use force="true" in your phpunit.xml.dist like: ...

Login throttling with Symfony and multiple server instances

Login throttling with Symfony and multiple server instances

Login throttling is possible with Symfony out of the box since 5.2. But the default configuration doesn't work as soon as you have multiple server instances. Why? Because it stores the relevant data on the local filesystem. So all we need to do is to exchange the storage layer

Use Vue modifiers to make form handling with Vuetify easier

Use Vue modifiers to make form handling with Vuetify easier

Vue contains two very convenient v-model modifiers for trim and number. Using them means that the models are only updated after the trim or number conversion are done, which means we don't have to do those things ourself anymore. As an example let's say we have a form with the

Typed constants with Record in Typescript

Typed constants with Record in Typescript

When I define types in Typescript, I also define a list of valid options as an object so that I can reference it in the rest of my code. A type definition for a currency would for example with a list would look like the following. export type Currency = 'EUR'

Reuse custom PHP Docker image for job queue in Docker compose

Reuse custom PHP Docker image for job queue in Docker compose

Depending on your setup, most likely you want to run the job queue container with the same image as the php container. Most time I see people executing the running php container and starting a job queue directly in there. A nicer way is to simply run a copy of

Beware of APP_DEBUG='false'

Beware of APP_DEBUG='false'

Symfony contains a great way to use environment variables in the service configuration. With the environment processor it's possible to supply bool variables the following way. # Subscribers App\EventSubscriber\ExceptionSubscriber: arguments: $areAllExceptionsTranslated: '%env(bool:ARE_ALL_EXCEPTIONS_TRANSLATED)%' tags: [kernel.event_subscriber] The related configuration in the .env

Format localized Vuetify datepicker value with Vue mixin

Format localized Vuetify datepicker value with Vue mixin

The example for showing a formatted date in a datepicker with Vuetify uses a computed property to format the value in the text field. Something like this:

With a computed property (or a getter function in Typescript): g

Add color to your bash script

Add color to your bash script

Longer scripts with a lot of output get confusing fast. A nice change of pace is working with colors there. For this you can use ANSI escape codes [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Colors]. In a script this might look like this: RED='\033[0;31m'

Type cast value objects in twig

Type cast value objects in twig

When working with value objects, it might make sense to typecast them within a twig template. Out of the box twig doesn't offer typecasting. But it's quite easy to offer it with a custom filter. Here is an example how the most basic castings would look like:

Switch between major composer versions

Switch between major composer versions

We all should be on composer 2 now for a while, but apparently not everybody is yet. It's very simple to upgrade, but also to downgrade. Upgrade with: composer self-update --2 And the downgrade is basically the same: composer self-update --1 I guess this will stay the same for the

Find duplicate rows in table with SQL

Find duplicate rows in table with SQL

There are constructs where you shouldn't have duplicate column combinations in a table. Best protection against it, is a combined unique constraint. But depending on when you join the project, it might already be to late and you might already have those duplicates in your table. It's possible to find

Check PHP extensions requirement with composer

Check PHP extensions requirement with composer

When configuring your server, you need to know which PHP extensions need to be installed and updated. But through changing dependencies it's possible that you don't need certain extensions any more. Or you've included a new dependency which needs a new extension. Previously much work to validate what you need,

Flexible CORS headers with Heroku and Capacitor

Flexible CORS headers with Heroku and Capacitor

CORS headers are an important security feature which you should take advantage of. There are some use cases where you have to supply specific urls for it. For example when you're building an hybrid app and use cookies and credentials in your request, as there you can't use * as Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

Round Moment.js to previous interval

Round Moment.js to previous interval

When working with dates and times it's not unusual to restrict the options a user can choose. For example when presenting the user with a dropdown of times to choose from, but only allow 5min intervals. You want to add a sensible default, for example the previous interval. So when