teaching
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Documentation in Laravel 8 with Enlighten
The importance of software documentation, even in an agile world, is undisputed. Keeping documentation, especially for APIs, up-to-date however can be an additional burden on a development team, and thus automatically generated documentation can help supplement this by producing reference materials. This is where Enlighten comes in. In this guide, we’ll get Laravel Enlighten up and running, which utilises your existing PHPUnit tests (because you should be writing tests) to…
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PHP and Composer on the Windows Subsystem for Linux
In this guide, I’ll be showing you step-by-step what you need to do to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and then both PHP and the Composer package manager. As a prerequisite, this requires an up-to-date version of Windows 10. Windows 8.1, 7, and below are unsupported. I will write about setting up PHP environments under legacy Windows versions in a later article. Step…
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Why I continue to develop with PHP
I have no doubt that if you work in any realm of software engineering, or have at the very least spent enough time on Twitter, you’ll have encountered the seemingly endless cycles of arguments about what programming language, framework, or paradigm is best, and why everyone else is wrong. PHP is no stranger to being a point of contention among different…
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Securing subject-specific knowledge in an unending battle but a vital one
Teachers of computer science face a challenge not commonly found in other taught disciplines – the need to continuously ensure that one’s subject-specific knowledge is continuously up-to-date and in line with both current trends in technology and substantial advancements in the field. Whilst many aspects of taught computing remain the same and are likely to remain the same for…
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My experiences teaching ‘unplugged’
A common misconception is that computer science, or computing, is a school subject that requires a lot of time in front of a monitor and that programming should be the vast majority of what students get up to, but alternative curricula that focus more on teaching computational thinking without the use of technology exist, commonly referred to as Computer Science Unplugged, or merely ‘unplugged’ for…