About this site

Refactorer's Journal is an independent publication launched in December 2024 by William Raendchen. If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. Your subscription helps Refactorer's Journal thrive, bringing you insightful programming content and supporting an independent voice in tech. Thank you!

What Makes Refactorer's Journal Unique?

I have been programming since 2011. Since then I have written real projects in Java, PHP, Lua, Groovy, GML, Ruby, Powershell, Scala, JavaScript and TypeScript. My biggest strength lies in PHP, because I have used it professionally non-stop for ten years, and I know its tooling and many libraries and frameworks inside and out.

A lot of the knowledge I have gained in over 10 years is language agnostic, e.g. about REST apis, testing (TDD and BDD), CI/CD pipelines, code quality tools (linters, static analyzers), code reviews, database design, software design patterns (and why they kinda suck), microservices (and why they kinda suck), project management and technical leadership. Expect practical guides and deep insights into these evergreen topics.

In the second half of my time I have worked on enterprise-grade distributed systems, with performance-critical and sometimes legal requirements. This is about the worst possible use-case for PHP. I thought that back then and I think it even more so now. But, if one good thing came out of all that, it's that it forced me to think very hard about how to do things right.

I want to share my knowledge with you here, and even though the content may feature a diverse set of languages, most of the concepts should also be applicable by PHP developers, and some of the PHP stuff I talk about could also be helpful for any newcomer to intermediate developer of any language.

These days I often use Scala for code snippets, because it seems to me the best language for that, with super short, expressive syntax, and yet C-like enough to be understood by most devs out there coming from PHP, JS, C#, and so on. Who knows? Maybe you'll discover your next favorite language here 👀