Design Patterns

The decorator pattern solves a problem that plain inheritance cannot cleanly solve: combining several independent additional behaviors, for example logging, caching and validation, flexibly and in any order, without building a separate subclass for every combination. This article shows how the decorator pattern in PHP preserves interface conformance and when it is preferable to inflating inheritance hierarchies.

@custom-media lets you name a media query condition once and reuse it everywhere in the stylesheet, instead of repeating the same width value in twenty places. Today PostCSS handles that translation at build time, but the Media Queries Level 5 specification brings exactly this capability directly into the browser.

A plain destructuring assignment breaks the reactivity of a reactive() object, because individual fields become plain copies. toRef() and toRefs() solve exactly this problem by turning each property into a standalone ref that stays coupled to the original source.

Primitive obsession, meaning representing business concepts as bare strings and integers, is one of the most common sources of unclear domain code. Embeddables turn value objects like Money or Address into first class citizens in Doctrine mapping, without requiring their own database tables.

Before aspect-ratio arrived in CSS, every responsive video needed a wrapper div with the padding-top trick, and every image gallery fought jumping layouts while content loaded. The aspect-ratio property solves this natively, with a single line of CSS, combinable with object-fit and container queries for stable, undistorted media layouts.

Anyone wanting to unify multiple microservices under a single GraphQL endpoint faces a choice between manual schema stitching and declarative federation. Both approaches solve the shared schema problem in fundamentally different ways, with noticeable consequences for team autonomy, performance and operational overhead.

"Do we need Pinia here, or is a composable enough?" is one of the most common architecture questions in Vue 3 projects. The answer determines whether global state is centralized or scattered, visible or hidden, DevTools-trackable or invisible. Choosing the wrong approach costs months of debugging effort once the application grows.

Hierarchical data such as category trees, org charts, or comment threads does not fit naturally into flat relational tables, and the chosen model decides whether inserting or reading stays fast. This post compares four established modeling strategies for tree structures in SQL by write and read cost, so the decision fits the actual access pattern instead of the first idea that comes to mind.

Anonymous classes let you define a fully fledged class right at the point of use with new class(), without assigning a global name. Used correctly, they replace mocking libraries in tests, avoid unnecessary class names for one off implementations, and let you write more compact yet type safe code.

A pure function always returns the same result for the same arguments and changes nothing outside its own return value. This principle of referential transparency makes PHP code predictable, easy to test and parallelizable, without any extra framework or new language syntax.