Recently I received notification that somebody post information about my article on Twitter (thanks!). Twitter usually renders a link to blog posts as nice-looking cards. The card to my article shown up without a featured image.

I checked my Twitter feed, and some of my other entries also suffer from missing featured images.

I do not use iCloud backup for my iPhone. Instead, I do local encrypted backup, more or less regularly. I wanted to browse and find something from one of these backup.

Did you know, that there is no native way on macOS to browse and restore something from your encrypted iPhone backup? I didn’t.

We get used to reading about big things – high-level architectural solutions, design patterns in action, or big data processing. However, most of our problems are small and lie at the low-level in our code. One of them is: how to synchronize a collection of entities with another collection, which is its simplified representation?

Imagine you have a collection of entities. You receive an updated version of that collection, e.g., from the API endpoint. But what if data are transferred using DTOs? We should add new entities based on data in DTO, update existing entities, and remove elements that don’t appear in the edited collection.

In this article, I’ll show you a generalized solution to this particular problem.

When you ever develop an API in the Symfony framework¹, you probably heard of the serializationGroup option. It allows you to define different groups of attributes to serialize and deserialize. However, defining these groups without proper consideration may make the whole development hard, e.g., if you need to deal with different scopes of the object’s attributes in many other endpoints.

I want to show you our approach to serialization groups in one of our projects. Together with my team, we use them to control the serialization of related entities on various endpoints in our API.

I use restic as my backup solution, and I haven’t had any problem so far, but recently one of my health checks suddenly stopped working, telling me that something is wrong with my backup. On the other side, restic has done its job, and everything works fine, so what was the problem?

The first draft of this article was about the code-style. I wanted to show you why it is important and why we should care about it. But the longer I thought, the stronger conviction I gained, that the code-style – whatever it means – is only a way to achieve a much more important goal.

I’m a big advocate of well-quality code. Besides good architecture, I pay attention to style – consistent spacing and indentation, coherent naming convention and other rules that make the code visually better. But how to convince someone, who never took care of style before, that is it a good thing?

During development, you probably take advantage of some extra command-line tools. In PHP world it could be a mess detector or program to check the code style. The framework you use also exposes some functionalities to clear cache, migrate database or generate documentation. All these commands are helpful but you need to look for them until you memorize the most useful ones. Sometimes you need to perform a task, like project initialization or restoring a stable snapshot of the database.

5 years have passed since I had started working as a professional software developer. Although the programming was my hobby since the early years, my skill started to grow when I had taken a real job.

I was surprised when I had recalled my very beginning because I noticed how much I had changed and how big progress I had taken. So, I decided to write it down.

In this article, I’ll take you on a short journey where I’ll tell you about my development process. You’ll find out what I’ve been thinking about, what I’ve been working on and ultimately what changed from my perspective. Ready?

I create a lot of notes. Seriously, I write tons of notes. Inspired by Getting Things Done method, I treat my mind as a thoughts generator rather than the storage. I capture thoughts, ideas, inspiring quotes, links, and pictures. Mostly using files.

Although I’m on the early stage of creating my custom note-taking solution, I’ve done some work to synchronize notes between devices and versioning them. In this article, I’d like to focus on the latter and I’m going to show you how to set up automatic files versioning.

I’m a software developer so, unsurprisingly, I use git to versioning my notes as well. Instead of manually committing changes, I take advantage of tools like fswatch and launchd to automate this process.

If someone would ask me about my favorite keyword in PHP, I would certainly answer: final. It doesn’t mean I write this modifier in each class or method. It not only shows the intention but also provides a mechanism to protect the code. At least from the assumption.

The final keyword can be used both on the class level and on the method level. It prevents future extension of functionalities in a non-effective way. If a class is marked as final, then we can’t inherit from it. If a method is marked as final, we can’t override it.

The theory sounds good. Let’s go to details.