What to Enforce and What to Leave Alone

Automate the arguments away

Formatting and style are not worth human attention. A formatter applied automatically ends the discussion permanently and frees code review for the things that actually matter.

Any review comment that a tool could have made is a review comment that should have been made by a tool.

The checks worth having

1. Automatic formatting on commit or in the pipeline
2. Static analysis at a level the codebase can actually pass
3. Dependency vulnerability auditing on every build
4. Tests, run automatically, blocking on failure
5. Type coverage increasing over time rather than all at once

Static analysis catches real bugs

Type errors, impossible conditions, undefined properties and unreachable code are all found before running anything. On a legacy codebase the first run is usually alarming and usually correct.

• Start at a level the codebase passes
• Increase the level gradually, fixing as you go
• Never suppress a warning without a comment explaining why
• Run it in the pipeline, not just locally

Review for design, not style

Consistency beats correctness of style

There is no single right way to format PHP. There is enormous value in a codebase where everything looks the same, because it makes unfamiliar code readable.

Pick a standard, automate it, and stop discussing it.

Frequently asked questions