Earilier this week, I published my first Symfony bundle. Should you use it? I don't think so. But I'm proud that I unlocked this achievement 🏆🔓

A little background.

Back in 2019, I started writing an application that keeps track of the points when playing whist. I called it dikdikdik, a typical bad name for an open source project. It refers to some catch phrase in Dutch, and it can be used at score.rijkvanafdronk.be. It has become rather popular over time, which I find very cool.

So ok, I created this app because I wanted something to help us with the scores of our card game. But maybe at least as important: I wanted to create an app to fiddle around, and to learn new things. I wanted to use Symfony and event sourcing, two technologies that were still rather new to me. After some time, I had a fun project, and I talked about it in a lightning talk at the last PhpBenelux conference (ever? 😢) in 2020.

Not long after that, in 2020, Covid broke out, and we couldn't play cards anymore because of the restrictions. So we needed an app to play cards online. Because I wanted that one to be event sourced as well, and because I didn't want to write everything again, I extracted all relevant classes and interfaces to a php package. rva-vzw/krakboem was born.

This package worked quite well for a couple of years. But things have changed. Back then, I used php 7.4. Now there's php 8.3, with final and readonly. I know more about the relationship between Traversable and Generator. I also have better understanding about what infrastructure code exactly is. And recently I learned how to use deciders, and krakboem didn't know deciders.

So krakboem could use an update, and that's what I did. I rearranged the classes, added final and readonly, introduced deciders. And while doing this, I also extracted all symfony messenger and doctrine code, and moved that to a bundle. So now I have a krakboem-bundle. And I also tagged version 1.0 of the base krakboem package 🎉

Not that I'm 100% happy with how krakboem is structured, but I didn't want to move every class around. And I'm fairly sure that it will be useful again for a couple of years without needing lots of changes.

The bundle is still experimental (version 0.1.2 at the moment); I don't really know yet how to properly create a bundle. But I am happy, because it already takes care of the dependency injection for the doctrine and messenger infrastructure.

So next thing on my to-do will be: upgrade my other krakboem-based projects, so that they all use my new bundle. I don't expect this to be a whole lot of work, but I don't have a whole lot of time either. So we'll see how it works out.