There are many ways to handle this, but the best solution in our case was to use a JSON settings column in our User model. — The latest feature we added to OLM is the ability to make yourself known to the world using your social media accounts. The links to your accounts appear on the photos you upload, in the Global Map. See the end result in this photo on the map. …

The problem is simple: our class is returning an array of key-value pairs, and this array is used in quite a few other places in code. — We recently pushed a new improvement at OLM to reward admins with XP for verifying uploaded images. The most critical part of the feature, a class that does some calculations and returns some stats, introduces a small design flaw. We’re going to see how to fix that in this post.

We want to display the number of users for each month. How do we account for months that have no data? How performant can it get? — Say we want to display the number of users that signed up in the last years, for each month. It’s not that hard to achieve but there are two little gotchas that become annoying once you begin to develop this. Q1: how do we account for months that have no…

PHPUnit allows us to DRY up our tests with Data Providers, which are methods that allow you to execute a single test multiple times, with… — Countless are the times I’ve had to test for validation errors, and countless are the times I’ve repeated the same code for this purpose. Duplicating testing code is not always a bad thing though, but for validation errors, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel right. If it is acceptable to…

Code should behave the same across all development environments. We’re using Minio to unify the experience. — You’ll often notice in various projects that code behaves differently depending on the environment. That is not ideal, as code should behave the same across all development environments. This way, it’s easier to debug issues, test, and refactor. In our case, we stored uploaded images on an AWS S3 bucket…

We’re refactoring a heavy command in terms of memory consumption, database strain, and execution time, in hopes of having it run daily. — We have a console command at Openlittermap that takes all the litter locations in the world and groups them into clusters for viewing on the global map. It’s a heavy command in terms of memory consumption, database strain, and execution time. That’s why it’s used sparingly, from time to time…

We’re extracting some pieces of functionality into their own classes. Their goal is simple: to do one thing, and one thing only. — A major pain point in programming is having to deal with all the clutter that is shoved into controller methods. One of the best ways to remedy that is extracting some pieces of functionality into their own classes. They’re called Actions, or Services, or whatever. Their goal is simple: to…

We’re adding server support for HEIC images by executing ImageMagick shell scripts. This way, we’re bypassing the GD or Imagick libraries. — Apple released a new image format called HEIC/HEIF, and it broke many apps that handle image processing. The PHP library Intervention Image caught up to it and added support for the new image format, but somehow, it isn’t working at the time of this writing. …

Going further we’re testing if unauthenticated users can upload photos, whether the images get uploaded to an S3 bucket, and more. — Before we start with the second part of testing our fat controller, let’s clarify what we should have from the start, that these tests are meant to be carried out like this in a certain dev environment. …