Announcement: Detailed PHP development practices series

This post is an announcement of upcoming series of posts. Target audience of the series are primarily PHP and OOP developers in general (although some languages might have different flavors of OOP).

It will be written from a perspective of primarily PHP backend developer with 12+ years of experience working in Magento/Zend framework and Symfony (although I do prefer raw PHP and writing code which is independent from any framework). I have worked on enough both brand new and completely ruined legacy projects that I’ve started to see multiple patterns of behavior leading to code degradation. It’s time to put that experience on paper, summarize and spread the knowledge.

The series will cover a lot of stuff:

• Object Oriented Programming in PHP and in general, with a hint of Functional Programming and other paradigms
• SOLID principles
• Design patterns
• Warning signs and bad practices
• Good development practices

But, this will not be just another series of generic tutorials with dry information available everywhere else. This will be a focused effort of analyzing software development practices and potential problems in them by running through well known and established principles — and criticizing them to oblivion when and if needed. The reason is simple: many software development practices are dangerous and create more problems than they solve, but they are still being repeated in numerous online tutorials/courses and taught in schools just because they are “well known and established”. I’m sorry, but I’m more utilitarian and pragmatic than dogmatic about everything in life, including work and programming. If something deserves bashing and discarding, it will be bashed to hell and forgotten like Google Glass.

Everything in the series will be well documented, covered with arguments, theoretical and practical examples. It will be all available in a GitHub repository along with samples integrated into a Symfony 6 application.

So, feel free to follow me and expect the articles soon.

Cheers!