I have been presenting ‘Pulling Up Your Legacy App By Its Bootstraps’ at conferences and user groups. It’s been a treat for me because I am learning a lot by sharing what I have learned in this project, and it seems helpful to the audience. I’m meeting people who are in similar work environments and when I get to the tools we used, I usually begin to receive questions. This is what prompts the most questions after the talk, too.
The first few times I gave the talk, I received a lot of enthusiastic questions about migrations with Phinx. Some of my audience had either not used a framework with migrations or didn’t know a tool was available outside of a framework, so they were eager to bring those into their projects. I added code samples of change(), up(), and down() methods to my talk.
I have been improving my description of Dependency Injection and briefly answering the question “what is DDD” and “why did you need it”. I believe I’ve better illustrated that point, but I feel like I haven’t answered those in the best possible part of my talk outline, and I’m trying to sort out where it may make more sense.
The last time I gave this talk, I received some comments that composer seemed awkward or was frustrating to use. As I asked questions, I learned that the pain area was actually about wanting to exclude the vendor folder from their project’s repo. I was able to share that we commit our composer.json and composer.lock files to the repo but ignore the vendor folder. This seemed to solve that issue, but I am curious if there will be other composer questions in the future.
Now that I have been able to add more code and explanation of the tools we are using, I am reorganizing my outline and optimizing the talk based on the feedback I have received. I really enjoy giving this talk and helping people. I hope I’ll get to share it more.