I recently discovered Rector and was completely blown away by its power and effectiveness. The promise is simple: you install and run the package, you get instant automated upgrades and refactorings. Damn, that’s bold, I thought as I dry ran it into one of my projects. While still reading their…

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. …

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. …

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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. …