Open-source contributor, speaker, and electronics tinkerer
Just about four years ago, I joined Mailchimp , the Atlanta tech darling focused on providing small businesses the tools they need to compete with the bigger players. Mailchimp itself had been acquired a few months prior by FinTech giant Intuit , makers of software like TurboTax and QuickBooks for a whopping 13 billion dollars. Last week, Intuit announced a Reduction in Force (RIF) of…
Whether you're auditing third-party libraries or trying to toughen up your own test suites, you've likely come across a project boasting "100% code coverage". It just sounds so official , right? 100% of this code is covered by automated tests, so it must be good! I have good news and bad news. The good news is that a high percentage of code coverage does generally reflect an above-average effort…
If you've worked in a lot of codebases, this scenario will be familiar: somewhere in the app, we're JSON-decoding a string, then using that to pass arguments to a method (such as a constructor). It may look something like this: $json = '{"first": "Steve", "last": "Grunwell"}'; $data = json_decode($json); $person = new Person($data->first, $data->last); I'd like to humbly ask that you stop doing…
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about helping smaller teams—especially those working with "legacy applications"—modernize their workflows. Working for a Fortune 500 company on an "enterprise-scale" application every day can cause you to take things like Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) for granted. With that in mind, I'm going to try to turn my attention to simplifying some of these…
Today we say goodbye to Shelby Marie Grunwell, a.k.a. the Greatest Dog to Ever Live. She came to our family by way of Canine Collective, a wonderful organization out of Plain City, OH that rescues dogs from high-kill shelters and puts them with loving homes . While we had originally visited the group's weekly event at a local Petsmart in order to start the process for a chocolate lab named Cocoa,…
Let's acknowledge something right out of the gate: working with dates and times can be a slog. Not a year goes by without some app breaking due to Daylight Saving Time or an assistant not realizing that March 31st exists . For those of us working in PHP—especially more recent versions of the language—dates and times don't need to be a source of pain. Instead of strtotime() this and date() that, we…
A major focus of my day job right now is cleaning up the PHP in a decades-old monolith, which includes tests written for two different test runners by hundreds of engineers over the years. I could write a book on the horrors I've seen (and currently have at least half a dozen blog posts in draft state), but I'm not interested in raking anyone over the coals for past engineering decisions—honestly,…
The last few months at work I've been deep in a refactoring project, cleaning up over twenty years of technical debt. It's been a massive undertaking, but it's rewarding work when I'm finally able to remove code that's been hanging out well-past its expiration date. One of the patterns that's come in extremely handy is the Adapter Pattern, which lets me decouple application code from the…
At last year's php[tek] , one of my biggest " holy cow, why haven't I been doing this?! " moments came from my friend Andrew Cassell when he explained PHP Value Objects in the context of Domain-Driven Design. Put simply, a Value Object is an immutable object that encapsulates some data and will always be in a valid state. The Beauty of PHP Value Objects was originally published on Steve Grunwell .
I've had Google Analytics running on SteveGrunwell.com to some degree since its earliest iterations over ten years ago. Over time, I've been lowering the amount of data collected because, to be honest, I wasn't doing anything with it. As a result, I'm proud to announce that I've removed Google Analytics tracking from SteveGrunwell.com effective immediately. Why I’m Dropping Google Analytics was…