Get a glimpse into our world, see what we’ve been getting up to and where we’ve been.
It’s easy to run Behat when you’re SSH-ed into your Vagrant machine, but it can take a long time when you have quite a few scenarios. Unfortunately, you can’t specify a scenario by its name, only its line number. Luckily, PHPStorm has a nice interface for test suites, and in their early access program, Behat support has been added.
Read more about Running Behat in PHPStorm EAP through VagrantAs a big fan of Vagrant, I decided to use it in my first Symfony project at VI.
Read more about Symfony, Vagrant and NFSThere may be times when Doctrine may or may not know if an entity already exists in your database. Doctrine ORM provides a handy way to merge an entity to the database, meaning that it will insert any new entities, and update any existing ones.
Read more about Updating Entities When an Insert Has a Duplicate Key in Doctrine ORMLike most companies, we travel in and out of work, each day. We would come into work a little later usually, in order to avoid the traffic, and work later too. It worked well, but with the early morning sun poking through the curtains in the morning, we were more eager to come into work earlier.
Read more about Sustainable Travel ChallengeWhen we found the Symfony2 framework back in 2013, we could see the power and potential it could have to the PHP community.
Read more about Symfony Saturday WorkshopMoving into Dock in late 2013 was our way of celebrating a very successful partnership between infrastructure and software development, as we acquired a Leicester-based start-up that specialised in web applications and software development.
Read more about Our New OfficesWe use a combination of Behat, Mink and Sauce to make sure all of our applications are automatically and continually rested. If you’ve ever suffered from ‘deployment dread’ (the feeling of fear that occurs for a few hours after deploying your code), it’s probably because you don’t have confidence in your automated testing - or worse - you don’t have any. We’ve tried a number of tools and processes to reduce our deployments dread, but none have cured our fear as much as Behat.
Read more about Handling Authentication when Using Behat & MinkLast weekend was the International Space Apps Challenge, which saw cities from all over the world gather for a two-day, space-themed hackathon. As we are quite-literally next door to the National Space Centre, we thought that we should give it a go.
Read more about Space Apps Challenge 2014Admittedly, we were a little bit nervous to hold our first lecture, but what better subject than a mini-round-up of the PHP frameworks that we have used, including a quick introduction as to why we love Symfony?
Read more about Our First Lecture on Symfony and PHPOn the 1st and 2nd of March, we attended the Leicester Civic Hack weekend, our good friends at Dock provided the location and excellent catering for the event. We went along primed to get stuck in, eager to use our development techniques, expertise and technology to inspire and ultimately produce something functional.
Read more about Our First HackathonHere at VI we’ve been improving some of our processes. One of the new things we’ve discovered, and immediately fallen in love with, is PHPSpec.
Read more about PHPStorm File Watcher for PHPSpec