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 →

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

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 →

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 →

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 →