Engineering

When I joined Devex a bit more than six years ago most of the code base was in one large monolith. This monolith was based on Ruby On Rails and was responsible for delivering devex.com. This part was called “neo”. I guess because it was a rewrite of a previous Java version. I am not sure if it was a reference to Matrix or the Greek meaning. There were already some initiatives in place rewriting parts of it in different services, but the monolith was always looming in the background. Any changes to it required increasing amount of work. It was like someone tried to put the definition of technical code into code. ...

When I wrote the review of The Manager’s Path I started to think about other books I wish I had read earlier. Usually these triggered some kind of change in how I approach my work or life. This list is definitely incomplete and I will add more to the goodreads list at the bottom of this post. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck I still remember when and where I read this for the first time. It was on a plane from the US OSCON back to London where I had my start-up. ...

John Resig: Write Code Every Day http://ejohn.org/blog/write-code-every-day/ Agilar: Scrum teams: self-organizing or self-directed? http://blog.agilar.org/index.php/2014/04/09/scrum-teams-self-organizing-or-self-directed/ etsy engineering youtube https://www.youtube.com/user/etsyengineering

Today I gave a talk at WeLovePHP, which is a quarterly talk and workshop series organized by Softonic in Barcelona. They also do one about JavaScript. I can highly recommend them if you are interested in PHP, JavaScript or related topics. I talked about the processes and tools we are using at Splendia. There are no pictures in the slides … sorry.

As hopefully most people working on software projects nowadays we are writing unit tests and do code reviews. Work-flow at Splendia As our project is a large PHP site we are using PHPUnit for unit testing and various static code checking tools (checkstyle, phpmd, pdepend, phpcpd) to verify the quality of our code. All of these are run on our integration branch, whenever a new feature is integrated. Before this can happen the code will be reviewed by other people in the team and only if there is a consensus it will be merged into the integration branch. ...