phpinsights is a tool you can use to get a nice overview of the quality state of a PHP project. The tool will analyze the code, complexity, architecture and some code style rules, then present four corresponding scores. Measuring over time will give you a sense of which areas of your code are improving, and…

Need to check the lines of code in a PHP codebase? The phploc tool has you covered. This will give a summary of lines of code, separating out comments and non-comments, then gives you a whole lot more. The cyclocmatic complexity measure is possible one of the more useful tools. Understanding that you have classes…

Got magic numbers in your PHP? Find ’em fast with PHP Magic Number Detector tool. probably seems OK to start with, but the next person (including yourself!) coming at this later will wonder what the heck ‘8’ is. And… if you want to search for any other reference to this ‘magic’ location ID… good luck…

Curious about checking out the quality of your PHP project, but don’t know where to start? https://github.com/jakzal/phpqa is a project providing docker images of various tools to help measure aspects of your PHP code. will run the phploc tool on your current folder But… you can alias the tool, then simply run $ phpqa <toolname>…

I’ve been posting more about this new service over on linkedin, but haven’t posted much here. CyclopsMonitor is a web monitoring service – checking if a web address is up, how fast it responds, if specific content is available, when SSL/TLS certs expire, when domain name expires, and… sending you notifications when problems occur. Currently,…

I’ve been testing out the Jetbrains AI service the past few months. Used Copilot for a while in 2023, then Codeium for about a year, and am now trying Jetbrains. I can’t say I notice much of a difference for most of the standard code I deal with, but I did recently start using Jetbrains…

Inspired by the AUTM conference, I got inspired to look at some of the common processes techtransfer folks do. Main idea was to try to develop something relatively ‘standalone’ that might address a use case I learned about, so I decided on building a web-based open source techfinder tool to publish licensable technologies. The notion…

Two Laravel packages I use often are packages to impersonate a user and packages to log activity (including model changes). Both are useful, but there’s typically one piece missing. Activity log packages will log *who* initiated a change, but not who the person may have been impersonated by. If I log in as me, then…

I’ve scoured many of the top results for “Laravel performance” in google, bing, duck duck go, etc… and am flummoxed that one of the key things to help boost Laravel performance is almost never mentioned. Specifically, I’m talking about the toBase() method in the query builder. The toBase() method will instruct the query builder to…

“Your present identity should not constrain your future habits”. For this quote from the audio book “Hello, Habits“. Obviously the book is about ‘habits’, but the phrase could easily have been “Your present identity should not constrain your future self”. In either reading of this, it’s been stuck in my head for while now.  How…