Posts filed under "Code" - Steve Grunwell

For a Great Time, Make it a DateTime

July 19, 2024

Let’s acknowledge something right out of the gate: working with dates and times can be a slog. Not a year goes by without some app breaking due to Daylight Saving Time or an assistant not realizing that March 31st exists.

For those of us working in PHP—especially more recent versions of the language—dates and times don’t need to be a source of pain. Instead of strtotime() this and date() that, we have functionality baked into PHP that dramatically simplifies the work of parsing, converting, and formatting dates and times.

Continue reading→

A typewriter with a sheet of paper reading "Equality"

Strict Equality for Better Code

July 1, 2024

In Code

A major focus of my day job right now is cleaning up the PHP in a decades-old monolith, which includes tests written for two different test runners by hundreds of engineers over the years.

I could write a book on the horrors I’ve seen (and currently have at least half a dozen blog posts in draft state), but I’m not interested in raking anyone over the coals for past engineering decisions—honestly, it’s to be expected with any project this size and age. Instead, I wanted to take a moment to talk about one of the most prevalent oversights made by engineers of all levels: strict equality.

Continue reading→

A pile of LEGO bricks spread out across a hardwood floor

Decouple Your Application Code with the Adapter Pattern

April 24, 2024

In Code

The last few months at work I’ve been deep in a refactoring project, cleaning up over twenty years of technical debt. It’s been a massive undertaking, but it’s rewarding work when I’m finally able to remove code that’s been hanging out well-past its expiration date.

One of the patterns that’s come in extremely handy is the Adapter Pattern, which lets me decouple application code from the underlying libraries that we use. This post will discuss how the Adapter Pattern works (with coffee-themed examples, as I tend to do), then demonstrate how it can help with refactoring.

Continue reading→

Taco, a black cat, peeking out of a white drawer

The Beauty of PHP Value Objects

March 12, 2024

In Code

At last year’s php[tek], one of my biggest “holy cow, why haven’t I been doing this?!” moments came from my friend Andrew Cassell when he explained PHP Value Objects in the context of Domain-Driven Design.

Put simply, a Value Object is an immutable object that encapsulates some data and will always be in a valid state.

Continue reading→

Handling Credentials in Laravel

February 5, 2020

In Laravel

I was recently asked to code review a friend’s first Laravel app, and when I cloned the repository from GitHub I immediately noticed a few big, red flags. Many of these were common mistakes, so I thought I’d take a moment to discuss how we can safely handle credentials and/or sensitive information in our Laravel applications.

Continue reading→

A mail slot, just below a bold sign reading "Private"

Building a Quick, Private Family Blog with WordPress

January 22, 2020

In WordPress

At times, it’s helpful to be able to create a secure, private family blog for sharing updates with close friends and family without posting to more public social media channels.

There are any number of reasons you might do this: sharing updates about a new child, a new city, or — in our family’s case — a new adventure.

Continue reading→

A series of pipes and gauges along a wall

Travis CI for WordPress Plugins

December 17, 2019

In WordPress

If you’ve spent much time on GitHub, you’ve probably come across repositories with green badges that look like this:

A lot of repositories will have these badges/shields, as they indicate that the last run of the Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline for this repository “passed” (e.g. everything is working as expected).

Now, Continuous Integration can mean a lot of things: maybe the project has a wealth of well-written tests that are all passing, or the simply that coding standards are all up-to-par. No matter the coverage level, this green badge indicates to potential users of your code that it satisfies the quality checks you’ve put in place.

Better yet, once we have a Continuous Integration pipeline in place, we can make it a prerequisite for pull requests to be merged. If you’re tired of PRs that don’t respect your project’s coding standards, ignore PHP compatibility rules, or otherwise produce lots of overhead, automating the high-level testing can save you lots of time.

Continue reading→

Demystifying Regular Expressions

June 21, 2019

In Code

Early in my career, I stumbled upon this regular expressions cheat sheet by Dave Child in one of those “10 cheat sheets every developer should have”-type round-up articles.

I had been using regular expressions for several years before I first noticed that other developers were struggling. Patterns that seemed natural to me were complex ciphers to my peers, and an audible groan would echo through the office whenever a solution that leveraged regular expressions was proposed.

Here’s the rub: regular expressions don’t have to be that hard. They certainly require a bit of getting used to and some practice, but regex patterns are tremendously useful when validating data, searching files, or even filtering tweets.

Continue reading→

A close up of a pair of stainless steel knife blades

Writing Custom Laravel Blade Directives

March 18, 2019

In Laravel

Though it’s far from the top of the list of most celebrated features, Laravel’s Blade templating engine makes it really nice to work with data on the front-end of our applications. With built-in helpers for handling loops, conditionals, and sub-views, Blade gives us a nice way to write dynamic templates that don’t feel like a bunch of PHP mixed in with HTML.

Were you aware you can author your own Laravel Blade directives? The syntax is probably a little under-documented, but it can be an incredibly useful tool if you find yourself applying the same patterns over and over. In this post, I want to show you a Blade directive I find myself using in pretty much every application I build: @activeIfInRouteGroup.

Continue reading→

A home sitting on a midwestern, prairie homestead.

Simplify Project On-boarding with Laravel Homestead

January 21, 2019

In Laravel

Despite working on Liquid Web’s Managed WordPress and Managed WooCommerce hosting products, a fair amount of the development work I do these days has very little to do with WordPress. In fact, my main project right now is using Laravel, and it’s the sixth Laravel application (depending on how you count projects) I’ve worked on in just under two years at the company.

Laravel’s an incredibly powerful application framework with a thriving ecosystem. Thanks to tools like Composer and Packagist, I have access to thousands of libraries, extensions, and utilities to help me build the best applications possible. Even out of the box, the framework has support for (among many other things) multiple database and caching engines, event-driven architecture, and websockets, giving me a strong foundation for building modern web applications.

Of course, incorporating multiple platforms and tools into a single application can make on-boarding new team members more difficult. How do you make sure they’re running the right versions of PHP, your RDBMS of choice, Redis, and more?

Continue reading→

Steve Grunwell

Open-source contributor, speaker, and electronics tinkerer

Category: Code

For a Great Time, Make it a DateTime

Strict Equality for Better Code

Decouple Your Application Code with the Adapter Pattern

The Beauty of PHP Value Objects

Handling Credentials in Laravel

Building a Quick, Private Family Blog with WordPress

Travis CI for WordPress Plugins

Demystifying Regular Expressions

Writing Custom Laravel Blade Directives

Simplify Project On-boarding with Laravel Homestead

Topics

Latest Posts

Upcoming Talks

Connect