Journal Entry For 2026-07-29

• Reasons to prefer a relatively known stack that gets out of the way over literally anything else:
  • The time I spend to get the wiring/plumbing/setup right.
  • The time I spend understanding the framework specific indirections.
  • I just had to work on a project at work that was first maintained by someone knowing too much about a certain framework and then by someone knowing too little. It was like pulling teeth as indirection is very often the path to madness in a work environment where there one project is always just one amongst many. No shared knowledge builds up about these things and even people who know, will, I guarantee it, leave the company.
  • So my rule is a simple one: Try as best you can to make all code reachable through clicking (navigating) in the IDE. If PHPStorm (in my case) can't discover how things fit together, then neither can I. And PHPStorm is even a somewhat bad example: Its extra plugins make it seems sensible to over-rely on framework features that are hard to understand if you don't know the framework well.
    • Spicy Takes:
      • Laravel's shorthand validation rules and macros are two examples that should be avoided™, if the whole team doesn't know about them:
        • The string 'sometimes' means nothing and is not discoverable easily.
        • The validate method on a framework supplied $request is a good example. That method actually doesn't exist on the \Illuminate\Http\Request Class! It's a macro defined in the registerRequestValidation on \Illuminate\Foundation\Providers\FoundationServiceProvider. Huh? Exactly.
      • Symfony's wont to define a lot of its service container graph outside of the source code with indirections like aliases and factories. Some of this can make sense in certain scenarios where you need to be flexible, but it mostly makes the app harder to reason about, because in the worst case you have to interpret xml or yaml files and reconstruct container behavior instead of just following the request's path through the app.

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