All of a sudden it became book-writing season. It began in August when I started revising my second book, “Principles of Package Design”. Apress had contacted me about adopting it, and they didn’t want to change a lot about it. However, the book was from 2015 and although I had aimed for it to be “timeless”, some parts needed an update. Furthermore, I had happily pressed the “Release” button back then, but it’s the same as with software development: the code you wrote last year, you wouldn’t approve of today.

During the great PHP Benelux Conference 2015 edition I published the final version of Principles of Package Design. Let me tell you a little bit about its history and some of the things I had to deal with.

A bit of history

My first book, A Year With Symfony, was released on September 4th, 2013. Just 6 days later, I started working on Principles of PHP Package Design. As it turned out, it was quite hard to keep the process going. There were several months in which I wrote nothing at all. Sometimes I picked up the work, but then I had completely lost my track and tried to get back on it by revising existing chapters over and over again. Meanwhile all kinds of other projects begged for attention as well, including the release of the backend project of the new nos.nl website, the preparations for the Hexagonal architecture training and the birth of our daughter Julia ;)

Seven months, two presentations and three blog posts later, I’ve published the first installment of my new book, Principles of PHP Package Design.

From the introduction of the book:

Naturally the biggest part of this book covers package design principles. But before we come to that, we first take a close look at what constitutes packages: classes and interfaces. The way you design them has great consequences for the characteristics of the package in which they will eventually reside. So before considering package design principles themselves, we first need to take a look at the principles that govern class design. These are the so-called SOLID principles. Each letter of this acronym stands for a different principle, each of which we will briefly (re)visit in the first part of this book.

Last week was a particularly interesting week. I organised three coding dojos, on three different locations. The first one was at the IPPZ office (one of the companies I’ve worked for), the second one was at the SweetlakePHP meetup in Zoetermeer. The last one was for a group of developers from NOS, a large Dutch news organization. Although that would have been enough, I finished the week with my revised talk “Principles of PHP Package Design” at a meeting of the Dutch Symfony Usergroup in Utrecht…

Yesterday I presented “Principles of PHP Package Design” at the monthly meetup of the AmsterdamPHP usergroup. This was quite an experimental presentation. I had prepared it on the same day actually, though I had been gathering the contents of it for several weeks.

Package design is a subject I’m very much interested in and you can be sure to hear more from me about it. Actually, I started writing a book about it! If you’re interested too, sign up on leanpub.com/principles-of-php-package-design.