Welcome to the Age of Static Analysis and Automated Refactoring
Programmers live a dangerous life. It’s so easy to make mistakes and mess things up, so we like to limit the scope of our changes. There may be large parts of a code base that we don’t dare to touch at all. It makes us somewhat conservative when it comes to large upgrades or refactorings.
If only we could have a tool that has our back when we make changes that influence remote parts of a code base, or that can even make those changes for us. One that tells us about mistakes immediately after we make them. And maybe even one that fixes our problems, without the risk of making a mistake.
Rector with Matthias Noback
Imagine if you could refactor legacy code with a single CLI command? Well, you can, at least if you are working with PHP.
Today we talk with Matthias Noback, a long-time web developer and the author of several programming books, including Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring, which he co-wrote with Tomáš Votruba. Matthias tells us how to use Rector in your daily workflow, how it automates repetitive maintenance and refactoring tasks, and what is the potential of this approach for other programming languages.
Voices of the Elephpant
Cal Evans hosts his friend Matthias Noback as they talk about Domain Driven Design and Matthias’ new book Recipes for Decoupling.
Leanpub Frontmatter episode 224
Matthias Noback is the author of the Leanpub book Recipes for Decoupling. In this interview, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Matthias about what he’s been up to since he last appeared on the podcast over eight years ago, changes related to widespread use of the PHP programming language in that time, how the pandemic affected his consulting work and meetups, legacy code, his books, and at the end, they talk a little bit about his experience as a self-published author, specifically, a method he has developed for keeping programming books up to date, even as the technologies they’re about evolve.
The Power of Automated PHP Refactoring
Matthias Noback & Tomas Votruba
More information on meetup.com
What even is PHP?
On this episode hosted by Jennifer Blumberg with guest Matthias Noback, we continue the “What is even…?” series by delving into exactly what even is PHP?
We talk about PHP’s originals, how PHP works from request to php-fpm worker processes to lexer to bytecode to JIT, the whole shebang!
We also discuss there are so few feature-rich, authoring experience focused CMSs written in languages other than PHP.
Finally, we talk about Rector, which is like Babel but for PHP, allowing you to improve and upgrade PHP code on the fly. It can even downgrade your code to older PHP versions if you like!
