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Christopher Davis
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My recent posts
Three Ways to Improve Internal Developer Experience (DX)
Developer Experience or DX is a relatively new idea. It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page yet (that I could find in July 2017). This is a fairly nice overview of the DX idea related to APIs and Heroku has a page dedicated to it. Symfony, an open source PHP framework we use quite a […]
Following best practices ensures your application is in the best possible position to live a long healthy life. Some frameworks come with a strong set of opinions that shape best practices. React, however, is very new and very much a library, not a framework. As such, its best practices are still taking shape. In the […]
On Mentorship and Feeling Like a Badass
Before I stepped into the marketing world, I was a classical guitarist and guitar teacher. When choosing music for a student to play and practice it’s important that the music is not all too hard or too easy. In other words, a guitar student needs to practice something that will push them, but they also […]
The Right Level of React Abstraction
Yesterday while reviewing a few pull requests from my coworkers, I was struck by how easy a few changes were in some React code. The changes were easy because the codebase in question had found the right level of abstraction in the pieces that were changing. ReactJS may be the next shiny new thing, but […]
Goodbye Servers, Hello Monitoring: Takeaways from re:Invent 2016
A few weeks post-re:Invent the hours of sessions and conversation have had a chance to sink in. Two years ago my takeaways from re:Invent were about microservers and stateless applications being the future. In a way a lot of the focus, two years later, is still on stateless microservices. Today, however, the future seems to […]
Forget app_dev.php In Your Symfony Application
I’m not a big fan of the typical app.php and app_dev.php setup in the Symfony Standard Edition. While it’s not a big deal if the app_dev.php file gets deployed, it shouldn’t be done anyway. It’s too risky and complicates the deploy process a bit. The alternative: environment variables that default to production mode. Create a […]
There’s quite a bit of outdated information about how to integrate Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics into a single page application. The goal here is to keep your application blissfully unaware of GTM, and, fortunately it’s pretty easy to do. So first off, fire up GTM and select your container or create one. […]
Keeping Symfony Form Values Around on Empty Submissions
Last week we ran into a problem with a Symfony form: we had a password field in a form meant to store an FTP password (FTP & SFTP are still the defacto way to move data around in the marketing world). When that form was first submitted with the password in place it was saved […]
Flexible WordPress Shortcodes with Locate Template
Underlying the entire WordPress template hierarchy is the locate_template function. locate_template pretty easy one to understand: it checks the child theme for the template, then the parent theme and either returns the template path it found or loads it for you. The idea is you pass it an array of template names with the more […]
Generators & Iterator Aggregate: A Match Made in PHP Heaven
PHP added generators in version 5.5. You see them in code with the yield keyword and they tend to be used most often to iterate over a collection dynamically without creating it in memory all at once. Really you can do all sorts of fun things with generators that we’re not going to touch here.
