Programming

Handling Complex Data Flows

In this post, written for the Zaengle blog, I explore some strategies for navigating multi-step flows. Separating the data from the logic helps make the process more manageable.

"At its core, programming is nothing more than stacking little blocks of logic on each other, building up a structure comprised of detailed organization, intentional design, and functional beauty. Unless those goals are held front and center it is only a matter of time before the system devolves into a convoluted mess of overlapping, overstepping, messy code."

Read the entire article on the Zaengle blog →

Feb 12, 2020

The X-Factor: Or, How To Debug

Have you ever been around a person, or maybe you are that individual, who has the innate ability to figure out what’s wrong with _____? Merely glancing at the computer that is behaving strangely causes the problem to disappear, touching the printer results in printed pages, or opening the hood of the car stops the squealing?

It’s a strange phenomenon, but certain people possess the ability to diagnose a situation, survey the playing field, and effectively implement a solution. I’m sure you’ve seen it happen before.

Truth be told, I don’t believe these people have any special magic. It is far more likely they’ve spent time honing their ability to observe what’s going on, consider possible courses of action, and choose the one that has the best probability of fixing the problem.

This is called troubleshooting.

Read the entire article on the Zaengle blog →

Nov 1, 2019

How We Keep Code Clean at Zaengle

Check this out to see how the team at Zaengle keeps code clean:

Let's be honest, we all like systematic, uniform code. However, maintaining a respectable level of cleanliness across multiple developers' systems can be a challenge. Thankfully there are a few tools to help unify our editors so that our code styling gets along!

Read the entire article on the Zaengle blog →

Jun 21, 2019

Programming for your Future Self

If you are anything like me, you may find yourself hacking on a variety of different applications during a given week. Occasionally I get the luxury of working on a single app, which gives my brain the freedom to immerse itself into the details of the program. However, inevitably at some point I have to set the project aside and fire up a different one… perhaps one that was written months, or even years ago.

Several thoughts have repeatedly surfaced as I re-familiarize myself with an old project. Instead of having to collect them each time, I thought I’d write them down here, to serve as a reminder.

Read the entire article on the Zaengle blog →

Nov 10, 2017

Sorting Parent Eloquent Models by a Child Relationship

Recently I had a situation in a Laravel app where I needed to sort a collection of parent models by a particular value in a BelongsTo() relationship field.

It’s fairly simple to sort the opposite direction, meaning, to sort all the related models that belong to a parent model.

Read the entire article on the Zaengle blog →

Oct 6, 2016

Simplifying Conditional Expressions

As I’ve been reading through Refactoring by Martin Fowler, I’ve found it helpful to rewrite some of the examples from the book in PHP in order to cement the concepts into my mind. While Martin’s examples are primarily in Java, I’ve found an overwhelming majority of the concepts apply to PHP, which is where I spend most of my programming time.

In today’s article, I will attempt to rework the Simplifying Conditional Expressions (pp. 237-270) section into a handful of PHP-based examples.

Read the entire article on the Zaengle blog →

Apr 16, 2016

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