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Conventional wisdom says to scope down your initiatives and make small tasks for your team members. It’s best if each can easily work on a single task in a silo, so they can get the project done with the least overlap and delay. But, what are we losing with this methodology?

I’m not a huge fan of todo comments in code because I think they’re mainly forgotten. However, I don’t have the same opinion for PHPUnit tests. Let’s talk about why - and how to easily add them in your code.

Never one to be afraid of pointing out my flaws, I think it’s time to share what I learned from doing a few interactive code review interviews. It may still be a great idea, but it’s much more difficult than I thought.

This quick tip will help you issue a reboot command during your Ansible playbook if a reboot is required.

If you find yourself about to say “we’re a family” to a new recruit joining your dev team, this entry is for you. Managers, you should stop considering or calling your team a family. Here’s three simple reasons why.

When given a choice of methods and ways to do something, it might not be clear which way is the best. As programmers, we tend to pick the easiest, then. However, the easiest can have security implications. Let me illustrate why we should use more stringent controls in a Laravel project.

I’ve seen a lot of high-performers enter slow-moving companies, make great progress, but then get upset. They can’t seem to move the company along anymore. What’s going on? Is it ok to move on? I’ve got a theory about all of this.

Since you’re a programmer, you’re always looking for ways to be a bit more efficient. Because of this, it can be easy to fall into the trap of being too programatic, too calculation-heavy in your unit tests. But, this isn’t a test then - its just another block of quite fallible code. Let’s talk about why and show what to do instead.

When interviewing a junior programmer a couple weeks ago, I was asked a very insightful question: “Who can I tell ‘I don’t know’ to?” At first, I wasn’t sure what they were exactly aiming at with the question. But, as I formulated an answer, I realized this was a great question. Let me share a longer version of the answer with you.

When your unit test suite gets larger, it can take quite a long time. One of the many ways to speed this up is to hunt down and fix slow tests. Let’s use PHPUnit’s test listeners to do just that.