About Mocking in Unit Tests

Recently at SCAYLE, I wrote a Laravel service that inserts data using Eloquent into a table like this: For people not familiar with Laravel/Eloquent: The HelloWorld model mirrors the database structure and the save method persists data into the database table. So far, so good. Like for any good and responsible project, I wrote unit … read more …

Data Transformation with Benthos

For a current project, I need to read data from an API, transform and push it to an AWS S3 bucket. Normally I would consider to use a standard programming language for that because there is no “magic” involved. However, one of the requirements is to use Benthos, a tool for “Fancy stream processing made … read more …

A few Notes about Migrating to Laminas

In 2019 I wrote about a MySQL 5.7 migration at Check24. While it is very exciting when working on new features, it is also a good thing to think about the architecture and use modern frameworks and libraries. Working on the architecture provides also the opportunity to improve source code quality and introduce quick wins. … read more …

Scalable System Design: Design a Contact Tracing System

In this post, I want to address scalable system design and how to grow a system while it’s user base grows. Because talking only about the theory can become boring very quickly, I want to discuss this topic on a practical example. Before I start with the design itself, keep in mind that there is … read more …

Migrate a Keestash App from jQuery to Vue.Js

When starting Keestash back in late 2018, I was focused on the PHP backend and how things might work “out of the box”. The frontend needed just some click handlers here and there and thus, jQuery was the choice. Now, about two years later, things have changed a bit. The frontend got a boost with … read more …

Mastering a MySQL 5.7 Migration Successfully

One thing I like at my current employer Check24 is the variety in topics and the trust in me to master them. This motivates me to take my work very serious, but also gives me a lot of responsibility since our products represent Germany’s biggest platform for comparing almost everything. But Check24 is not only … read more …

PHP Exceptions and the Stacktrace

The beginning of this week was a little bit more action packed than planned. After a couple of weeks of coding and intensive testing (seriously!), @rauchbar and me were of the opinion that the feature is production ready and could be deployed. But well, shit happens when you least expect it. PHP Stacktrace As developers, … read more …

Converting Roman Numerals To Decimal Integers

Algorithms fascinate me again and again. They seem to be very hard to understand, but once you have practiced enough, you will recognize common patterns. Once you reach the state where you see a problem and can imagine a solution, it seems like that you just adjust the previous algorithm used. Saying this, I am … read more …

Vagrant Getting Started

The last few days, I was busy getting started with Vagrant. Vagrant is a nice tool to create a development environment to ‘just start’ developing. New team members, for instance, do not need to set up, but can simply run ‘vagrant up’ to have a fully configured, ready-to-start environment. Personally, in my case, it is … read more …