I have been developing websites and JavaScript apps for over five years now and using ReactJS for over four but never inside of an organisation. I have rarely, if ever, had to read other people’s code and my experience collaborating on a codebase is limited to the few projects I have done with friends. I was curious before joining MyBuilder about this transition, what it would be like to get to grips with a large codebase and how the process of writing code would differ.

Here at MyBuilder we recently had the chance to work on a green-field project, which of course meant we were able to play with all the shiny new toys we’ve been dying to try out for a while.

We needed to extract a standalone PDF generation service from some work we’d already done in another project. It was a perfect candidate for running inside AWS Lambda, and thus also finally giving Bref a try in production.

I remember a colleague in a previous job repeating the mantra “program to interfaces, not implementations”.

This sounded like good advice, but it felt a little abstract to me, since in PHP variables do not have types. The values of the variables have types, but the type of an object in memory is never an interface — it’s always a class.

Hot off Neal’s PHP Conference UK ‘Running Your PHP Site on AWS Lambda’ talk a day before, we got the chance to chat all things Serverless PHP with Bref creator Matthieu Napoli.

One of our front-end engineers, Sebastian, has been working on a few side projects recently, one of which included setting up user pools in AWS Cognito to handle his user management. As he was showing me around the things he’d been doing, it got me thinking “how easy would it be to defer Symfony’s authentication to Cognito as well?”.

Earlier this week we were lucky to spend some time talking to Symfony core team member Nicolas Grekas. It was very interesting to gain some insight into how he got involved in the project, and managing open-source contributions vs. day-to-day work.

In this post we will progress in implementing the proposed endpoint behaviour documented in our RAML design. Using the online/offline DynamoDB abstractions that we constructed in the previous post, we will incorporate the ability to view and remove specified mince pies from the challenge.

It seems as if React is everywhere - follow this tutorial to uncover the power of React and at the very least have a production ready webform.

Our very own Neal Brooks has recently presented at SymfonyLive London 2018, discussing how to run PHP and Symfony on AWS Lambda. I was lucky enough to grab him for an hour to expand upon his interesting talk and the experiences he has had going Serverless with Symfony.

Symfony’s long term support for v2.8 ends in November. Eek! Quite a substantial part of our codebase relies heavily on 2.8 and some of it can’t be updated yet.

We can’t yet make the jump to v4, so we settled on upgrading Symfony to v3.4. In this short article I’ll describe how I stumbled over a completely unexpected problem with overwriting a standard password encoder used in user/password authentication.