A place for code I want to explain, mistakes worth remembering, and the occasional story from my life.
PHP 2 min read
A customer may not have a billing address yet. The nullsafe operator can express optional traversal, but it should not turn required billing data into a silent null just before cre...
PHP 2 min read
A callback is created while a retry counter is zero. The counter is incremented later, but the callback still reports zero. A use ($counter) capture took the value at creation time...
PHP 2 min read
Named arguments can make a call with several boolean options easier to read. They also mean the caller depends on the callee's parameter names, not only their positions. Renaming a...
PHP 2 min read
A supplier client throws a low-level exception. The application wants to report “catalog import failed,” but replacing the exception with a new message loses the original stack and...
PHP 2 min read
A CSV import opens a file and processes rows until a validation error throws. If cleanup exists only after the loop, it is skipped on that error path. Resource cleanup belongs in a...
PHP 2 min read
A configurable import rule uses a regular expression. A malformed pattern is reported as “no matching rows,” so an operator assumes the supplier sent an empty file. The parser hid...
PHP 2 min read
An invoice has a due date, and a reminder should go out three days earlier. With a mutable date object, calculating the reminder can also change the original object. The invoice th...
PHP 2 min read
A name limit that works with ASCII behaves strangely for Nepali text. strlen reports bytes, so a short Unicode name can use more bytes than its visible character count suggests. Th...
PHP 2 min read
Casting a string to an integer is a conversion, not a validation rule. A malformed quantity can become a plausible number, and a legitimate zero can be lost if the validation resul...
