A walk on the dark side

There has been an Awakening…

Introduction

This summer our tech lead told us that we were allowed to spend a percentage of our time at work doing or researching about something we weren’t used to (a kind of Google’s “20% time policy”… but in the good way). There was only one condition: we would have to give a tech talk to the rest of the team on the chosen topic.

Teaching is the best way to learn.

Motivation

Because I often make fun of the programming languages that my teammates use in their daily work (100% trolling just for fun I swear; I do not want to start any kind of nonsense programming language war) I thought it would be great to pay them back using a language I haven’t touched for ages: PHP.

Idea

I’m a real fan of automation (even when we spend more time coding the thing than the time it actually saves us afterwards), so based on a function we all use at work almost every day known as “automatic issue closing via commit messages” (I guess all web-based Git repository managers have a fancy name for that) I started to code a Bitbucket Webhook¹.

Webho… what?

A WebHook is a HTTP callback: a web application implementing a webhook will POST a message (payload) to an user-defined URL (web service) when something happens. It’s that simple.

So, in my case, what I coded was a Githook but on the other side (basically it connects Bitbucket+Trello).

I don’t think it’s worth giving further details about my project itself but I can summarize everything in these points:

• Someone on the team pushes to a repo

• Bitbucket sends a payload to our webservice

• It parses that information and then: do whatever we can imagine.

Conclusions

It was very fun to get out of my comfort zone (I can’t tell how many years I’ve been coding exclusively for Android platform) and I can confirm that I’ve taken advantage of the great opportunity we have at work (I wish everyone had it): I have learned a lot (and now I am able to troll them even more 🤷).

PS: we’re hiring!

Disclaimer

There are neither slides (I splitted my tech talk into: a code review where my teammates got their revenge pointing up all my mistakes 😃 & a live demo) nor public repository (I don’t dare to make it public because I know it’s not as good as I’d like) but someone from my team (who’s a real Jedi in PHP) thought the idea could be improved (which I think is an amazing proposition because we can still learn about it) so maybe in the future we’ll release something based on this.

Stay tuned!

This article was originally published on Medium

[1] Even though it could be a simple script I demanded of myself to meet some requirements: neither use frameworks nor libraries of any kind, follow good practices, patterns and SOLID, and add some tests (PHPUnit is love, my friends).

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