Week 8
Whoosh! That's the sound the week made as it flew by! It has been a good one, though... Here's what I've been up to!
Client dashboard
I created a lightweight set of interfaces and classes (with tests) for working with our LDAP data. In our first iteration, we were using the Drupal LDAP module but one of our developers working on the project at the time had reported issues that the module didn't handle multivalued LDAP properties. I checked out the latest Drupal 8 version of the module but it appears to be very much a work in progress with code calling non-existent services. So I concluded that for our simple use case, it would be better to keep things as simple as possible.
More on that next week!
Symfony UK online meetup
I'd been to Symfony meetups in person whilst working in London before the pandemic but this was the first virtual Symfony UK meet up I have attended. There were two excellent talks, the first by James Maclean was all about structuring CSS in large projects: he spoke about how projects often evolve to the point where everyone is scared to make changes (or at the very best, have no idea what will be affected by a change) and how applying the Inverted Triangle of CSS principle can help organise the layers of CSS into something that's manageable. Thanks for the talk, James! You can watch the talk on YouTube, it's well worth it!
The second talk was by Ciaran McNulty on Test-Driven Architecture, Ciaran showed by example how a test-first approach can inform the design of the software we build. What I found interesting about this talk was the idea that you might write a failing acceptance test but then write a series of the micro (unit) tests one after another, making those pass until finally, your original acceptance test passes too.
It's a good talk, full of tips and is also worth watching on YouTube.
In the ears
I have no idea what reminded me of it but this week I've been listening to a podcast that first broadcast in 2007. The magnificent Rissington Podcast. Hosted by Jon Hicks and John Oxton-King, it was billed as "Gardners Question Time for the Web and I'd forgotten how much it made me chuckle back in the day. Thank you Jon and John for all the laughs and web-safe cheese advice! The podcast episodes are available on the website or on Spotify.
I've also been listening to the PHP Internals News podcast and specifically the episode with Larry Garfield about the enumerations RFC as I plan to get involved with that soon.
Hope your week has been good, see you next time!