A Year of Architecting: Part 1
Roughly a year ago, my company was acquired by an Australian telecom. Suddenly, my colleague, Ben, and I went from being ragtag developers building an entire system, to being the CTO (Ben) and CSA (me) in charge of entire potential team of developers at our disposal.
With the instant demand for growth, our three-year legacy of code that worked great for us was suddenly starting to show its age. Setting up our own system was muscle memory at this point, but it was in no shape for a junior dev to jump in and start coding "Hello World".
When it comes to local development, our code had a variety of hurdles. Databases with millions of transactions, a long list of essential third party APIs, and a mess of security credentials to connect them. We maintained multiple systems each built at different experience levels, using different frameworks, calling different configurations. It was a beast.
Our first step was to normalize the setup process. All websites were moved into GIT, writable directories were minimized to a single folder, configurations, schemas, VHOST files, and /etc/hosts spoofs were moved to well defined /docs file names, all logs were generated in a global folder, and README.md installation instructions were added for every setup.
With the first waves of new devs joining, the modifications helped but it still left the developers struggling over nuances like PHP versions, write permissions, and database installs.
And then we found Composer...
