Essential and accidental difficulties

Code Complete book explains this phenomenon in Chapter 5:

• Essential difficulty — it’s required things to to in order to have the user story done. Basically, essential things are described in acceptance criteria

Abstraction and encapsulation

Encapsulation picks up where abstraction leaves off. Abstraction says, “You’re allowed to look at an object at a high level of detail.” Encapsulation says, “Furthermore, you aren’t allowed to look at an object at any other level of detail.”
 — Code Complete

Using patterns for reducing complexity

There is a common opinion that OOP patterns reduce complexity of code and project in general.

To me it was sort of obvious, before I spoke to a frontend guy, who hates OOP and does some functional programming. He said that he hates all…

Exceptions

1. If it’s a command, do not return a result, just throw an exception in case of fail (also related to CQRS cause you can not say if command succeed by returning value)
2. An exception suppose to be custom and detailed, don’t use basic exceptions, it make it harder to debug

Constants in unit tests

I like to use constant literals in tests instead of constants itself.

Add code instead of changing it

As a project grows, we have to add the new functionality.

Let’s say we need to add a new validation rule for the old field. We’ve got 2 options:

1. find the existing validation for this rule and change it, which will affect…

The only thing which matters for your project

I think it’s a good test coverage.

I saw quite some projects: big and small, old and new, with and without test coverage.

Getter names for optional properties

Sometimes we have to deal with properties, which can be null

/**
 * @var string|null
 */
private $description;

It’s fine, IDE will generate a getter for us

public function…