Donate to protect them directly or help international organizations.
Creating Courses and Talks with Mind Maps
September 2nd, 2015
Many people are intrigued when I say that I am able to cut my course and talk preparation time by roughly 70% using mind maps. The first instinct is to write slides, but that is wrong. Slides are linear. With the ability to make transitions, add pictures and express ideas in full sentences, they are a […]
Forcing Doctrine to Persist
August 12th, 2015
I stumbled upon a case where Doctrine would refuse to persist my entity due to a very special circumstance. Here’s the context: I’m using a generic method in my Repository to fetch a Post. I’m selecting partial fields like this: […]
Converting a Joined Resultset Into a Hierarchy
July 2nd, 2015
I needed nested resultsets in some projects. I’ve seen a lot of StackOverflow chatter which essentially pointed people towards Doctrine or Propel ORMs, which was overkill when you didn’t want mapping or even model classes. I built a very small function that will transform joined results into a hierarchy. This avoids using heavy ORMs if you just […]
Naming functions consistently
June 16th, 2015
I believe that in order to write readable and maintainable code, we must name our functions in a consistent way. What I noticed by reading a lot of code, especially frameworks, is that developers use too many different verbs when naming functions. It’s even worse when the verbs are meaningless, such as handle, execute, do, match, […]
Composer Security Checker
June 9th, 2015
Stefan Priebsch made some very interesting points in his IPC talk about dependencies. Someone in the audience asked how often should we update our dependencies. Stefan recommends not to touch dependencies if everything is working and only monitor for security updates. However, monitoring security updates for a big dependency tree would be tedious. Here comes my […]
Magento 1.9 on PHP7
May 30th, 2015
I tested many applications on PHP7 and only one of them had an issue: Magento 1.9. The issue was very easy to fix. I couldn’t find a way to submit a patch because only Magento 2 was on GitHub, so here’s the patch if you decide to upgrade. […]
Conference Travel Expenses
May 19th, 2015
Some conferences cover expenses of their speakers, other conferences don’t. Travel and accommodation can be extremely expensive and some speakers wonder why a conference would choose to put that burden on the speakers. There are many ways to run a conference. I believe that all conference models are valid. Ticket price The price of a ticket […]
Doctrine not saving ManyToMany
March 26th, 2015
Say you have a ManyToMany relationship, like Post <—> Tag. When you add tags to a Post and the save the Post, everything is great. But when you add posts to a Tag and then save the Tag, the posts are not saved. Why? Because Doctrine persists changes only on the owning side of a relation. The owning side is […]
How skiing made me a better developer
March 4th, 2015
I’m currently sitting at T-Bar & Grill in Panorama, British-Columbia, Canada. I had a great week of skiing and another week to come. While ripping the slopes at ear-popping speeds, my mind was surprisingly free to roam and explore ideas that lead me to this article. I’m going to tell you how skiing made me […]
Should Conference Talks be Written in Advance?
March 3rd, 2015
I had a discussion on Twitter today regarding a conference’s selection process. It was suggested that speakers should be forced to write their entire talk before submitting it to a conference, perhaps even presented at a local event. This might work for speakers who give the same talks over and over again, but that’s not the majority. I organize a […]