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 …

When to use Traits in PHP

Traits were introduced to PHP in version 5.4. While classes were introduced in version 4, class inheritance was – as in Java – limited to single inheritance only from the very beginning. Class Inheritance: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly Class Inheritance is a central concept in object oriented programming and exists in every programming … read more …

PHPAlgorithms 1.0.0 is there

Last year, I announced PHPAlgorithms. Since then, I worked a lot on this repository as part of my personal learning progress on Algorithms and Datastructures. Now, I am proud to announce that we have reached our first milestone – version 1.0.0. With the support of the community, we fixed remaining issues and made this release … 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 …

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 …

Traversing a 2D Matrix

The new years first blog is about algorithms (again😅) – more precisely: 2 dimensional matrices. I want to explore the ways how to find connected 1’s (so called islands) in a 2D array. This problem is also known as the “find the number of islands” or “connected components in an undirected graph“. Disclaimer: I generally use … read more …

How To Simple RBAC

Since I have been asked a few times for a “how to” for my “Role Based Access Control” library, I want to summarize this in a little blog post. Maybe the last one for 2018 🙂 Simple-RBAC ist designed to be lightweight. The main purpose is to grant or deny permissions to users using RBAC. … read more …

Recommendation Assistant 1.0.0 is here

It has been a while since I released the initial version of RecommendationAssistant, my Master’s Thesis in coorperatin with Nextcloud GmbH and Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences. Today, I am happy to announce version 1.0.0. What has been changed? Most of the work is on how recommendations are being calculated. Earlier this year, I dropped … read more …

Didapptic.com reaches a new milestone

Recently, we deployed another milestone of didapptic.com, the platform for evaluating mobile apps for teaching. So far, didapptic enables users to add apps to the database and give them a rating from a teaching point of view and edit or delete them. Didapptic fetches app data, such as descriptions and screenshots, from the iTunes/Google Play … read more …