All posts tagged with "PHP" from the Software Engineering Laboratory.
A hands-on guide to refactoring working-but-messy PHP into clean, maintainable code. Learn to recognize nine common code smells, apply five core refactorings with runnable before-and-after examples, and refactor a grade calculator step by step, safely and without changing behaviour.
Read more →A systematic, hands-on introduction to the five SOLID design principles for PHP developers. Learn Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, and Dependency Inversion with concrete before-and-after refactorings, smell checklists, and a complete Laravel invoice-processing example that combines them.
Read more →Learn how software engineering fundamentals adapt to startup environments where speed, validated learning, and lean MVPs matter more than perfect architecture. This tutorial walks through building a startup idea validation dashboard with PHP, covering wait-list management, analytics hooks, rapid validation techniques, and practical deployment strategies.
Read more →A comprehensive guide to Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) for PHP developers. Learn why synchronous call chains break at scale, how events decouple services, the core patterns (Pub/Sub, Event Sourcing, Saga), and runnable PHP implementations using Laravel events, RabbitMQ, and Redis Streams, with idempotency, retries, and dead-letter queue strategies throughout.
Read more →A comprehensive guide to designing RESTful APIs with PHP. Learn REST constraints, resource modelling, HTTP verbs, status codes, pagination, authentication, and versioning, then build a complete course-registration API with Laravel that you can run and test today.
Read more →A hands-on introduction to Docker and containerization for PHP developers. Learn images, containers, Dockerfiles, and docker-compose by building a multi-service PHP + Nginx + MySQL stack from scratch.
Read more →Learn how to automate the build-test-deploy pipeline for PHP projects using GitHub Actions. Covers workflow syntax, Composer caching, PHPUnit matrix testing across multiple PHP versions, deployment to VPS via SSH, and managing secrets and environment variables securely.
Read more →Learn how to use LLMs like Claude, Gemini, and local models to generate, explain, refactor, and extend PHP code. Covers three real-world coding workflows, prompting patterns, responsible-use guardrails (hallucination checks, security review, licensing), and a hands-on exercise with runnable PHP code.
Read more →A hands-on introduction to Model-View-Controller (MVC) and Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) separation patterns for PHP developers. Learn how each pattern works using a student-course enrolment domain, compare Laravel MVC with a Vue.js-backed MVVM client, understand trade-offs, avoid fat controllers and leaky ViewModels, and refactor spaghetti PHP into clean architecture, with runnable code samples throughout.
Read more →Master the OWASP Top 10 (2021 edition) through practical PHP and Laravel examples. Learn how to prevent broken access control, injection attacks, cryptographic failures, insecure design, and security misconfiguration in real-world applications.
Read more →