How and When to Use PHP’s Pure Intersection Types

In this publication of my PHP related blog series, I want to address Pure Intersection Types in PHP. In the previous blogs of the series, I addressed different features added to PHP with PHP 8 and PHP 8.1. The first blog was about readonly properties, the second one focused on Enums and the third and … read more …

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 …

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 …

Brushing Up My Computer Science Skills – A Deep(er) Dive

This blog post is about Computer Science and my current skills in it. While I started to work on side projects (such as PHPAlgorithms, Keestash or Unread News), I have neglected my theoretical knowledge (and the practice following the theory). I want to brush them up a little and utilize this blog post as a … 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 …

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 …