up one level
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2017-01-31

Tags: #mingling

This Time Following the Persona of Michael Toppa and Learning about Clean PHP Code and Boston Tech

By w̶i̶e̶l̶d̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶.̶c̶o̶m̶ author Morgan Jassen

Since I found the persona of Michael Toppa ( https://twitter.com/mtoppa ) had a habit of publishing online on the topics of Web Development and Software Development, I occasionally look online to see what they have published.

This time, I followed this tweet https://twitter.com/mtoppa/status/796372624767119360 and finally ended up here, where it looks like that (now in 2016), ActBlue is hiring for tech Jobs in Boston (Somerville) -- "Jobs at ActBlue Technical Services" https://secure.actblue.com.../jobs#tech

Additionally, this time, I followed the twitter profile link to toppa.com, and read this blog post "Mike’s Talk on Dependency Injection for PHP" (http://www.toppa.com/2015/mikes-talk-on-dependency-injection-for-php/)

In the blog post was a link to a 71-slide long slideshow entitled "Dependency Injection for PHP" (http://www.slideshare.net/mtoppa/dependency-injection-for-php)

I read through the slideshow. Some of my own take-aways after having read through it were:

- I'm glad that the examples were in PHP and included examples from a WordPress plugin.
- I liked looking at the (pictures of) text code samples (yes, pictures. pictures of text) in the slides, how each code sample picture was short enough to fit on the top part of the slide, so it was manageable to read.
- It was good for me that there was a review of object oriented classes use in PHP at the beginning of the slideshow. I needed this review.
- I felt that the concepts of Dependency Inversion and Dependency Injection were very advanced for me. I feel like historically I have written a lot of procedural PHP code, and haven't leveraged these techniques, neither under these names nor under any other names.
- Even though some of the concepts in the slideshow were new to me, I was glad to have been introduced to them. Also, I'm glad to have read in the slideshow notes of why these are powerful, and how these can be used.
- It was inspiring to have learned from the slideshow the overarching idea that there are these techniques to make code cleaner, more extensible, and more maintainable. I feel like I'll now be able to look to these techniques myself as I go forward and write/maintain larger, more complex code bases.
- I also appreciated some humorous pictures and references in the slideshow. Becasue it was 71 slides long, some humor did make it more easy to look through! For example there is a link in the slideshow, on slide 70, to this cartoon depicting a code review, from a link to on the web, here: "WTFs/m" http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

In conclusion, this time, from following some of the online publishings of the persona of Michael Toppa, I've leaned something about clean, object oriented PHP code, as well as about some things that are happenining in the Boston tech scene. Thanks to the author for having published (shared) these!


[2019-03-11 edit: Moved to: https://i̶n̶v̶e̶s̶t̶o̶r̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶r̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/2017/... .html.]