Viktor Babanov
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My dev environment for php projects

Project development requires not only programming skills but also the ability to set up an effective working environment. In this article, I'll share my experience in creating a dev environment for PHP projects using Docker. I'll explain how to organize the file structure, configure Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml, and share useful tips on optimization and security. Whether you're working on a pet project or preparing for team development, these practices will help you create a reliable and flexible development environment.

Dev environment with Docker (generated by ChatGPT)

This environment is based on my favorite and most frequently used tools:

September 30, 2024
About 6 min
Public or private by default, what to choose?

When I worked on another project, I met an interesting opinion. They say, all the code in the project should be as open as possible by default. I.e. we should make all new methods and fields public, and we should not put final anywhere, except some special cases when it's really necessary. It was motivated with the difficulties of further codebase support:

If I want to inherit the class, and there is a private method, I have to study the code to understand why it was made private and whether I can make it public.

This opinion was very unusual for me, and I decided to figure it out if there is really more problems when fields and methods are private by default.
Let's write an extra public method and see how easy is it to support it.

interface FooInterface {
  public function foo();
}

class Foo implements FooInterface {
  public function foo() {
    // do stuff
    $this->bar();
    // do stuff
  }

  public function bar() {
    // do stuff
  }
}
April 30, 2023
About 3 min
Don't do this: nonexistent trait fields usage

With this article, I open a rubric "Don't do this." It will contain code from real projects, from which I will remove all references to the projects themselves. And, of course, my explanations of why shouldn't you do this, and the way it should be done.

So, the first patient. Inside the trait, the fields of its descendants are used. I mean something like this:

trait Foo
{
    public function bar(): string
    {
        return $this->field . static::CONSTANT . $this->method();
    }
}

Note

Or even worse, $this->{$attribute}. But it's out of the question, as the chance of getting an error 500 rises to almost 100%.

April 23, 2023
About 2 min
An example of setting up xDebug in docker

Once upon a time, I put together a working environment with PHP, xDebug, Docker and PhpStorm. Since then, I have been dragging it from project to project and felt happy. For those who find it difficult to set up a local environment with Docker and xDebug, I am posting this config with explanations. Here below we will create a Docker image with xDebug installed, configure PhpStorm and explain a working configuration for Docker Compose.

xDebug setup example in docker
January 21, 2023
About 3 min
Has IT-bubble burst?

A year ago, when I changed jobs, I didn’t even publish my resume. I acted like this from previous experience: every time opening a resume to the public, I had to communicate a lot with companies with which we obviously could not succeed. So I asked my friends what companies are currently looking for developers, knocked on a couple of doors and found a great place. Later, however, it turned out that we did not quite fit each other with this company, and I quit. I am sure that if I opened my resume, I would again, like a couple of years before, have to dig myself out of the responses of HRs. For me personally, things have changed a lot since then.

IT-bubble
January 10, 2023
About 2 min
Elusive 502, or How did Senior Developers Couldn't Find an Error

What are the worst mistakes in programming? I would single out two types:

  • those that cause a business to lose a lot of money
  • and those that are the least common.

While the first ones are immediately clear, what about the second ones? The fact is that the less often we encounter some type of error, the more difficult it is to understand what caused them.

This happened to me at work as well. One morning, the testers noticed that some requests to the backend returned a 502 (Gateway Timeout) error. This bug was a release stopper, so all the senior developers and a devops engineer took it up. At first, it was believed that Nginx returned this error, and the backend had nothing to do with it. After a while, we realized that PHP was to blame. We sinned for everything: turned off the BlackFire, changed OpCache settings, tried different patch versions in PHP, and so on. However, the error itself was not in the infrastructure, but directly in the application code.

Ошибка 502 Bad Gateway
September 14, 2022
About 2 min
How to use PHP without installing it (Linux)

The answer is definitely simple: use Docker 😃 Benefits I get from using PHP like this:

  • No need to bother with setting up a local environment, switching PHP versions, installing additional libraries and resolving conflicts
  • One text file with command line aliases is enough for any version of PHP to work on any computer. And from here
    • Ease of transferring data between machines
    • You can safely demolish the system on your main computer, restoring work with PHP will be as simple as git pull

Note

This article is about parsing the use of docker in one specific scenario, so if you are already familiar with this technology, you can safely skip it. The rest of you are welcome to the further reading.

How to use PHP without installing it
August 19, 2022
About 5 min
How to choose an infrastructure tool

When an IT product evolves, there always comes a time when it becomes necessary to bring some new tool into it or replace the old one with something more suitable. While it seems that a lot of articles have been written on the topic of choosing tools, and there is nothing new to say, the question still remains relevant, in some places even sharp.

How to choose an infrastructure tool

Here are the most popular approaches:

  • Find something hype on the left road
  • Take something proven and reliable on the right road
  • Go straight ahead and use your favorite tool

They are good because you don't have to think when using them. You just take what you want - and that's it 😃 Well, if there is a need or a desire to approach the issue more seriously - welcome under the cut, we'll figure it out.

August 8, 2022
About 7 min
How did I use the Builder design pattern

There are many architectural patterns in the development world. Some of them we use every day, some - less often. Surely each of you has seen the Singleton and the Factory many times. Many of you have written them on your own. But when I first read about the Builder pattern, at first I did not understand in what situation it can be applied. What is completely ridiculous: I regularly used its implementation (QueryBuilder from the Yii framework), but my eye was so blurry that I could not match the name and functionality of this class and the corresponding design pattern 😂 Of course, after a while it dawned on me. And over more time, a situation was found in which the Builder pattern fit perfectly.

The Builder design pattern
July 18, 2022
About 2 min
Forbidden topic or How to deal with procrastination

There is such a topic among us, IT people, which is usually avoided. The fact is that we are not able to work productively all day long. On the one hand, this is no secret to anyone. On the other hand, it is not customary to discuss it, and for some reason we think that no one but ourselves is in the know. In an ideal world, a programmer with good experience, thirty or forty years old, is quite capable of working a couple of hours a day with great efficiency, devoting the rest of the time to all sorts of routines: code reviews, communication with colleagues, task analysis, and so on. In the real world, procrastination lurks around every corner. No wonder one of the most popular memes in IT right now are memes about burnout.

Burnout
July 1, 2022
About 7 min
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