How To Roll Your Own

As we mature as software developers, it becomes more and more important to increase the speed with which we are able to develop or applications. This can be done in a number of different ways, e.g. use a new IDE, use a new framework, pull in a specific package via composer, … .

In the last couple of years however, I have felt the need to take this concept one step further by creating a set of custom PHP packages that are perfectly in line with my own preferences and work flow. These packages have allowed me to significantly speed up the development of my projects by reducing the amount of repetitive actions and boiler plate code.

In this talk, I would like to give you a brief demonstration of the tools and techniques I have used to accomplish this and show you can do the same for your projects, be it Laravel, Symfony, Drupal or Wordpress. Additionally, I will highlight some of the lessons I learned over the last couple of years while taking this approach.

Transcript

1. How To Roll Your Own Building your own development tools
2. www.ixudra.be - @ixudra
3. First website
4. Latest work
5. Lots of progress
7. A utom ation R educe errors Increase flow Development speed
8. #1: Reduce errors
9. Increase technical knowledge
10. Increase functional knowledge
13. #2: Increase flow
14. Better tools
15. - Dave Barry “Meetings are an addictive, highly self- indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.”
16. – New York Times, 2004-10-11 (i.e. BEFORE Facebook) On a typical day office workers are interrupted about seven times an hour, which adds up to 56 interruptions a day, 80% of which are considered trivial, according to time- management experts.
17. How to reduce interruptions • Buy noise cancelling headphones • Shut off email notifications • Shut off Skype/Slack/Facebook notifications
18. How to reduce interruptions • Buy noise cancelling headphones • Shut off email notifications • Shut off Skype/Slack/Facebook notifications
20. – Bill Gates The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
21. Automation
23. A utom ation R educe errors Increase flow My personal growth
24. A utom ation For this talk
25. Disclaimer
26. How it all started
27. /ixudra/ixd-template • Custom project template • Preferred file and directory structure • Project config • Commonly used composer packages
29. Custom Laravel packages /ixudra/generators
30. Custom Laravel packages
31. /ixudra/portfolio
33. /ixudra/csi
34. /ixudra/curl
36. In retrospect • Very time intensive but very much worth it. • Focus is on reusability
37. Other examples
38. Other examples
39. Benefits • Huge gains in development speed • Increased consistency in all of my projects • New skills and and techniques can easily be transferred to other projects • Learned lots of new things in doing so
40. Benefits • Huge gains in development speed • Increased consistency in all of my projects • New skills and and techniques can easily be transferred to other projects • Learned lots of new things in doing so
41. Benefits • Huge gains in development speed • Increased consistency in all of my projects • New skills and and techniques can easily be transferred to other projects • Learned lots of new things in doing so
42. Benefits • Huge gains in development speed • Increased consistency in all of my projects • New skills and and techniques can easily be transferred to other projects • Learned lots of new things in doing so
43. Disadvantages • Being stuck in the same routines makes it more difficult to learn new things • More difficult to jump into a new project that doesn’t follow your workflow • Developing packages is hard • Very easily for packages to become obsolete
44. Disadvantages • Being stuck in the same routines makes it more difficult to learn new things • More difficult to jump into a new project that doesn’t follow your workflow • Developing packages is hard • Very easily for packages to become obsolete
45. Disadvantages • Being stuck in the same routines makes it more difficult to learn new things • More difficult to jump into a new project that doesn’t follow your workflow • Developing packages is hard • Very easily for packages to become obsolete
46. Disadvantages • Being stuck in the same routines makes it more difficult to learn new things • More difficult to jump into a new project that doesn’t follow your workflow • Developing packages is hard • Very easily for packages to become obsolete
47. How to start your own?
48. Time vs effort
49. Step one: check the competition
50. Step one: check the competition
51. Step one: check the competition
52. Step two: environment setup
53. Step three: research best practices
54. Step three: research best practices http://phppackagechecklist.com
55. Step four: implementation
56. Step five: documentation
57. Step six: set up reminders
58. Closing remarks • Call for action • Create one or more of your own packages and let me know how it all worked out • Take a look at my packages and tell me what you think • Rate this talk to help me improve my speaking abilities
59. Closing remarks • Call for action • Create one or more of your own packages and let me know how it all worked out • Take a look at my packages and tell me what you think (http://github.com/ixudra) • Rate this talk to help me improve my speaking abilities
60. Closing remarks • Call for action • Create one or more of your own packages and let me know how it all worked out • Take a look at my packages and tell me what you think (http://github.com/ixudra) • Rate this talk to help me improve my speaking abilities
61. www.ixudra.be - @ixudra Thank you all for listening http://github.com/ixudra
62. Thank you all for listening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTdA7kf2cUM https://joind.in/talk/c4100