Best of: Posts I Still Refer Regularly to My Engineers
It's more than 6 years that we let loose of Qafoo (our consulting company for software quality with special regard to PHP) in favor of Frontastic (now commercetools Frontend). Since then I on-boarded a large number of engineers and sooner or later recommended multiple of the following articles to them to understand why and how our teams build software. Reason enough to conserve this currated list of blog posts for everyone to read.
I categorized the posts in 3 different sections, while I link a post from multiple sections if it fits. Do you also have important learnings that you refer to basically every engineer? Please leave a comment on this Linked.in post!
Software Design / Architecture
I believe in an object-oriented, slim domain model for web applications. The following posts explain the basic principles for developing successful (PHP) web applications, along with some underlying basics.
Bonus: Abstract Classes vs. Interfaces (this is rather philosphical 😉)
Refactoring
Perfect code does not exist. If you aim to find the perfect shape for your code, you will sooner or later find yourself stuck in analysis paralysis. My approach is as follows: first, write code that fulfills the purpose. Next, ensure it fits the business case. Then, refactor it into a maintainable structure (this step is not optional!). These posts will guide you along this path:
Ways of Working
Code is only one fraction of what defines leading engineers. The "how" and "what" to do are much more important. Here are some insights into how I believe development teams should operate: