This is the first instalment of a new blog post series where we give you an insight into what we have been up to, some of the technical problems we’ve been wrestling with and some of the discoveries we have made.
It’s been an exciting week. We have been getting things in place for a few upcoming projects. We’re looking forward to getting stuck in as we’ll get to use some interesting technologies as a result – more on that in the next few weeks.
What we’re doing
We’ve got two newbies starting over the next couple of weeks adding to the combined knowledge library and the brilliant personalities within the team. I’ve also been invited to speak at the We Are Developers World Congress 2021 on standards and why we use them. The Congress is the world’s largest annual gathering of software developers, engineers, software architects and technical decision makers and well worth watching while it’s still being held online Tickets are available from the We Are Developers website: https://www.wearedevelopers.com/world-congress/.
I seem to be getting out a bit lately, as I’ll also be speaking at the next Brum Tech Tapas, coming up on the 23rd June…that’s less than a week away! Instead of tech talk, I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned about mental health coping strategies.
ThinkTank’s Laurence Butler will talk about engaging audiences museum-style and PhD researcher Angela Kumah will share what she’s learned about resilience and recovery post-COVID. Tickets for are available on eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/brum-tech-tapas-tickets-149106536665
What we’ve learned
Now for some tech talk – we’ve been looking into the new Attributes in PHP8 and how best to use them. We decided that the ArrayShape one is very useful, allowing us to keep clean and concise code, whilst still being able to enforce types within our code. We have used ArrayShape on two projects so far, and no doubt many more to come.
We also worked on Docker, upgrading one of our projects to PHP8, Nginx and PHP-FPM, as a result we learned that the speed increase for this particular project is immense compared to apache.
Another technical question we had was around the best way to handle inconsistencies in API returns. This is an ongoing conversation, but right now we’re looking at a few different options for handling this.
In Other News
Our weekly Mario Kart tournament is ongoing. Having reset the awards last week, our director, Dan, is currently in the lead with one star. The team hopes that, as a result of his controller mysteriously going missing, we might be able to win a round.
Check back in soon to hear what we’ve been up to.