This entry is part of an ongoing series involving the review of a code sample and it’s refactoring. For the original code sample, see here. So far, we’ve done quite a bit of work on our Twitter class, making it better. There’s still work to be done, though, especially improving the logic. The Twitter class [...]

This entry is part of an ongoing series involving the review of a code sample and it’s refactoring. For the original code sample, see here. Editor’s Note: The response of the community to this series has been great, and I’ve been given a large number of suggestions. I’ve incorporated some of those suggestions into the [...]

Much was made last week over the topic of micro optimization in PHP. Most of these argued that micro optimization was a bad idea, from the perspective of unit testing, the idea that “premature optimization is the root of all evil”, the fact that it takes too much time, and that it violates the rules [...]

Have you ever been handed some code and told, “make it work”? If you haven’t, chances are good you will some day. It’s often a daunting task, especially since, as one programmer told me, “comments come when the second developer has to make changes.” While this is likely bad coding practice, it’s happened to me [...]

There are two really great experiences in my PHP life: the day I learned how to use PHP, and the day I installed XDebug. Ok, perhaps that’s an overstatement, but XDebug is one of the best tools I’ve ever used. I think every developer should use it, and for the next part of this series [...]