Battle Ready Laravel

Aside from being a natural perfectionist and always wanting to produce the best possible end product, I soon understood short-cut solutions and poor quality code almost always came at a cost to everyone involved. I’m talking about apps being shipped with frustrating bugs, or annoying issues that seriously slowed down the progress of the whole team.

I know I’m preaching to the converted here, but a clean codebase and overall well-engineered solution will always be better in the long run. It might take a bit more time upfront, but it’s well worth it.

As a developer, I always knew this to be true. But when I dug into the code of an app, I’d constantly find myself saying things like: “this works, but it could have been so much better” - or “what on earth were they thinking when they wrote this?”.

Of course, the reality is we don’t live in an ideal world. Tight deadlines and strict budgets mean we don’t always get to spend as long as we’d like perfecting every single line of code.

Ever lay awake at night worrying whether your code is secure and working properly? Maybe you’ve been anxious because you’re expecting there to be customer complaints in the morning when you log onto your work computer?

Yep, me too…

But the good news is it doesn’t have to be this way.

In fact, as I started to grow as a Laravel developer, I began to come across ways to quickly improve my apps. Little tips that made them more robust, professional and maintainable.

For example, setting up a good quality CI (Continuous Integration) workflow made a massive difference when it came to improving the quality of my code and feeling more confident in my apps.

Whenever I added new code and merged it into an existing codebase, having a CI workflow meant I could be more sure it would work properly and not break any existing code. What’s more, the whole team could move faster and pick up on potential errors before the code made it to production. Team members could now contribute to parts of the codebase that they might not have worked on before, because they could rely on the test.

That’s just one example, but such techniques really can make all the difference to your life as a developer, helping you improve your existing apps - and make better new ones.

As well as feeling like a more competent developer, I also found I was also able to add new features and respond to requests more quickly. Clients were happier and the whole team could cut down on those tedious email chains that every developer is surely familiar with.

What if you could do the same? What if you had an arsenal of techniques you could use to improve your Laravel apps? Wouldn’t it be great to learn how to improve your developer skills, and finally be able to unleash your code onto the world with more confidence?