UK’s ICO Guide to GDPR

Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the the UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.

They have published their own Guide to GDPR, which I find somewhat better than this one from the European Union.

GrumPHP – PHP quality control tool

GrumPHP is yet another quality control tool for PHP. But unlike a million other – PHPUnit, PHP CodeSniffer, and the like – this one is more of a tying knot. GrumPHP integrates via git hooks. It runs one more of the other tools, making sure that the changes you are committing are up to the par.

The support for other tools is excellent. You’ll find anything from the basic unit tests and coding style checks to commit message formatting and content, Robo tasks, and even custom shell scripts.

Monorepos: Please don’t!

I have only recently discovered the concept of monorepos. It does sound interesting and I am yet to try it out, or, at least, dig deeper into the subject. But then, there are people who have strong opinions against them, and I the reasoning makes all the sense to me. Here’s a nice one: Monorepos: Please don’t!

ISO-8601, YYYY, yyyy, and why your year may be wrong

Erica Sadun blog post goes into details of the difference between ‘YYYY’ and ‘yyyy’ when formatting dates. Remember to add a few unit tests to your application to make sure you are using the correct format.

We’ve recently seen this issue at work and it was a pain in the butt to troubleshoot.

Picking the right API Paradigm

There are not many people who I trust on the subject of API design like I do Phil Sturgeon. He has been a prominent speaker both online and at numerous conferences, covering a variety of problems, solutions, and approaches in the API design domain.

In one of his recent blog posts, he shared a diagram (see above) which provides a clear illustration on which API paradigm – REST, GraphQL, or RPC – one should pick for a web application, based on a variety of criteria.

I think this is probably the simplest of all the explanations I’ve seen around.