Basecode.net

Its interesting that since my last post I’ve been made redundant from my position at The Sound Alliance. They cut back the development team to bare bones as the good work we did made maintenance a lot easier. Effectively we coded ourselves out of a job! I wont go into it here though.

Anyway, I’ve found another position at The Royal College of Physicians and have had a week and a half off. Well not really “off” but working on a freelance project for an old client. It involves implementing some workflow automation within their Intranet that I developed about over the last 4 years and haven’t touched for 2 years .

What I’m amazed by in this is how my code style and even logic evolves over time. Its made me realise that I learned a lot of good technique while at TSA. Its also highlighted some of the great design decisions and techniques I already posessed.

If you look at your old code and cant see room to improve, you’re missing something – or its genuinely good code!

The dynamic nature of PHP defines – you don’t need to declare all variables, inherently adding the notion that adding them initially was a pursuit to be avoided.

So why re-implement a feature people bothered to un-impliment?

$this->that;

VS ~

$this->getThat();

function getThat(){
    return $this->that;
}

At least make redundant set/get [tters] dynamic. Use of the magic __set() and __get() methods means the benefit of protecting access to your objects properties can be encapsulated into your base class easily enough.