PHP

As a PHP developer, I should probably rejoice when someone's saying "we do microservices in PHP". I don't. I'm fine with PHP and I like microservices but the combination is just bad. PHP is a tool for solving a narrow range of tasks (i.e. making websites) and if you're trying to do something out of this range (i.e. making microservices) — you're gonna have a bad time.

In this post, I tried to collect all microservice-related PHP problems I saw over the years.

Imagine you have two groups of date ranges and you want to determine whether they overlap.

Nah, let's make it harder. Imagine you have two groups of include date ranges and two groups of exclude date ranges. Your task is to determine, whether there's a date that is present in both include groups and not present in exclude groups. How to do that?

I had to fix performance issues of one API endpoint. A pretty Symfony endpoint that gathers some data from database, assembling it to some structure and returns it as json.

Performance started being an issue when major part of that "some data" started to be 60000 entities. In worst case response time was almost 20 seconds. "Ok", I thought, "60k is a big enough number to make it slow". But trace showed that retrieving data from DB isn't a slowest part. There were things taking almost 1/3 of request time each. And these things were easy to fix.

Imagine you want to rename form parameter but you also want it to accept old parameter name in requests to preserve backwards compatibility. Here's how you do it.

Junior dev's life is hard an full of dangers. You come to technical interview and think "at least I'll learn something new from guys that know it better than me". Well, not really. Threre are some things that are ok in interviews and are totally wrong in real life. Here are some examples.

So you want to shrink images with PHP and ImageMagick. Here are samples of all filters so you can select the one you like most.

I've heard about composer long before I started using it. I couldn't understand why it's so much cooler than downloading dependencies manually. I couldn't understand why it's worth running composer install after every code fetch.

This article is for guys like me in the past. If you're already using composer you can stop reading.

You better watch out
You better not cry
You better not clone Yii objects
I'm telling you why
Object cloning is coming to town not supported in Yii 1.1.

Copy-pasting two functions between projects is boring so I've created a GIANT COMPOSER PACKAGE with class with these two functions. It can convert relative urls to absolute and to add get parameters to urls. It's called urmaul/url.

UPD: I wrote this for swagger v1.2. Stuff has changed since then. Now swagger supports single-file YAML specifications, so making them is easier now. What a time to be alive!

A few days ago was the first time I created a REST API documentation. This is the report on how I did it.