There are a lot of developers who manipulate databases using an ORM and don’t know more SQL than the “classic” SELECT … FROM … WHERE … queries. But databases have various unknown features that can avoid programing data processing. One of them is CTE (for Common Table Expressions).

This article describes how to use this feature with PHP Doctrine ORM.

Every year, I try to learn a new programming language. Over the years, I’ve learned or (re)discovered languages like Ruby, Elixir, Rust, Go, Python or Typescript. This year, it will be C#. But in the AI era, where lesser and lesser code is humanly written, still it interesting ?

When a tech company grows, teams organize themselves around technical divisions (front-end, back-end, infrastructure, DevOps…). This division is quite natural, as it brings groups with similar skills. But this organization isn’t without problems.

With AI, developers can focus on the essential: added value for users and software architecture.

Personally, I’ve been too much focused on code and technical quality. But with the AI, writing code becomes secondary, allowing us to concentrate on what really matters: solving user problems and create sustainable software architecture.

But AI should not be used without control. It should be a guide on what to implement and how. Developers should be architects and AI should only write technical implementations.

Unlike other programming languages, PHP does not allow for multiple constructors in a class. However, defining multiple constructors can be beneficial in various scenarios, such as creating an object from different data types. If this functionality is not available in PHP, named constructors can be used as an alternative solution.

Do you build Docker images regularly? You certainly know that just because your image was built without errors, it doesn’t mean it works as you expect. Building a Docker image, like any code, must be verified and validated. As your code, you can write tests that will check your images.

I’ve been sharing technology and programming articles on X (Twitter) for several years.

Unfortunately, the Twitter ecosystem has been deteriorating, and more and more people migrate to alternatives.

That’s why, all my social publications are now also available on Mastodon and Bluesky.

In most cases, to back up a MySQL database, the mysqldump command is used (it’s the official utility provided by the database). But did you know that the command is risky and can disturb your production?

PHPUnit has been release 8 months ago (the 3rd of February 2023). But if we try to use it in a Symfony project using the symfony/phpunit-bridge component, a PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class “PHPUnit\TextUI\Command occurred.

This is not new, I’ve been hearing it for several years, everybody wants to limit meetings. One of the latest examples is Shopify, which is considering eliminating all recurring meetings with more than two people.

When starting to write unit tests in a project and we want to have some test metric, we usually start with the code coverage. This indicator is very used, but it’s also very criticized.

Do you really know how your PHP project consumes the memory ? If the answer is no, you should consider using PHP Meminfo.

Having a monorepository project means to get all applications and components at the same place. This post isn’t about the avantages or drawbacks of this project management strategy, a lot of developer blogged about the advantages or drawbacks. This post is about how to manage your Composer dependencies in the specific case of monorepository based project.

You may not know about it, but it want to replace the RSS format. The first version of new syndication format called JSONFeed was released on May 17, 2017.

Headless Chrome is shipping in Chrome 59 (currently in beta), it seems that we can use the browser without UI. It is very interesting for testing and automated purpose. In this post, we are going to configure Behat (a PHP framework for autotesting your business expectations) to use Chrome in headless mode.

If you are a PHP developer, you might know Behat, the most popuplar Behavior Driven Development (BDD) framework for PHP. Personnaly, I frequently annoyed when I have to write scenario with an UI which is using Select2, because it’s not possilbe to manipulate the field natively with Behat and the Mink extension.