Nearly every application in existence requires some form of configuration. After all, no two instances of the same app are exactly the same. The "tried and true" (read "quick and dirty") way of doing this has conventionally been with arrays. This works well for most basic configuration values of scalar types, however, sometimes it may be necessary to configure complex objects.

Frameworks are among the most important tools we developers have and yet they are often taken for granted. The way I see it is a framework has two primary benefits: 1) saving individual developers time by providing predefined solutions to common problems and 2) allowing teams to work more efficiently by giving them a common model for coding standards, file organization, design language and more. However, these benefits quickly break down when framework conventions are broken or ignored, intentionally or otherwise.

My presentation from the June 2019 azPHP meeting on PsySH, the terminal-based interactive PHP debugger and REPL.

We've all been there... banging our heads against a wall for 20 minutes wondering why our app isn't working before we realize we forgot to seed our database when running migrations. Okay, easy fix:

$ php artisan migrate --seed
Migration table created successfully.
Migrating: 1996_02_27_123456_create_pokemon_table
Migrated:  1996_02_27_123456_create_pokemon_table
Seeding: PokemonSeederReflectionException : Class PokemonSeeder does not exist