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Archive for category: Tutorials

The benefits of keeping functions short

0 Comments/ in Tutorials / by John Richardson

There are undeniable benefits to limiting the scope and size of our functions. I don’t like to focus so much on ‘keeping them short’, as I believe this can often lead to decision making based on cosmetics alone, but it’s a quick way to get the message across nonetheless. Regardless of which way you word it though, it’s an important piece of the clean code puzzle and it’s one which in my experience is often overlooked. What’s particularly frustrating about this, is that as a concept/rule it’s so easy to adhere to. Unlike SOLID for example, which you could argue takes an ongoing mental effort, or at least a fair bit of practice to pick-up.

Anyway before this post turns into a rant, let’s look at some of the benefits – and if you’re one of those full-page-function kind of developers, maybe (hopefully) I can inspire you to think twice next time around. Read more →

March 4, 2018

Install xdebug and enable profiling.

0 Comments/ in Tutorials / by John Richardson

Installing xDebug and enabling profiling is a two step process which is outlined below. Read more →

February 25, 2018

PHP interfaces, what are they and when should you use them?

0 Comments/ in Tutorials / by John Richardson

As a junior PHP developer, you could probably be forgiven if you have not yet stumbled across or made use of interfaces. As someone more senior, you’ve obviously not been keeping up. Interfaces have been around since PHP 5.0 and are now widely adopted in most well written libraries and applications. With that in mind, I’m sure you’d agree that it’s worth spending a couple of minutes to figure out what an interface is and when you might consider using one. Read more →

July 22, 2017

Laravel – Selecting columns when eager loading relations.

0 Comments/ in Eloquent, Laravel, Tutorials / by John Richardson

Eloquent, the ORM native to Laravel can be powerful when used in the right hands. However, if you’re unaware of how things work beneath the hood you may, at times, find yourself struggling. I’m often asked questions related to how eager loading works, and selecting columns when using eager loading seems to raise a common issue.

Consider the following: When selecting columns and using eager loading (via the ‘with’ method) you may find that your query returns 0 results, regardless of whether relations exist or not. This may seem confusing at first, but when you understand  how eloquent implements eager loading, it begins to make sense. Read more →

October 25, 2016

Boost your search engine CTR with structured content

  • structured content
0 Comments/ in Tutorials / by John Richardson

Structured content is said to be playing an ever increasing role in SEO. It’s underestimated, underutilised and it’s importance is growing. If you’re not using it, then you’re missing out on a chance to Boost to your SEO and CTR(click through rate). Oh, and the cherry on the cake is that it’s reasonably straightforward to implement. Read more →

June 27, 2016

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Recent Posts

  • The importance of abstracting third party services
  • The benefits of keeping functions short
  • Install xdebug and enable profiling.
  • Laravel news – the artisan optimize command is being removed in Laravel 5.6
  • TLDR: league/oauth2-server project is in need of a new maintainer.

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