Introduction to the Deep Dive

Hi everyone

I’ve been meaning to do deep dive articles for a while, and have always struggled to find the right code samples and stuff.

This weekend I made the decision to take a project I’ve been working on (Mafia Online) in a different direction, and port the codebase (which is shocking, for the reasons I talk about here) into a fresh Laravel installation.

Now, the scary part of that, is as follows; lots of people talk the talk frequently, but you can never really see what they’ve done, the things they’re capable of, and how they go about practicing what they preach.

Mafia Online was never supposed to go live. It only went live because a few of my friends liked it and I thought “well, why not?”, but because it was never supposed to go into production, it was built, well, shoddily.

This brings me to the next point of these deep dive articles. I want to cover, in depth, programming principles, software design patterns, and various other things. I need a real, working codebase to do this.

I also wanted to hold myself to account to not take shortcuts, so, I made the new Mafia Online codebase open source. No license attached, if you want to contribute to the project, awesome. It’s not a commercial project, so if you want to fork off and do your own stuff, great. Want to create your own clone of the game? Go for it.

You can find the repository on GitHub, and every now and then I am going to post real world code samples and examples of how to implement the things that you’ve heard of.

I realise I am likely to open myself to a world of pain here, but that is what kind of the point. I want to empower developers new and old, to learn new things, to make themselves vulnerable to criticism. This gives you the ability to learn new things through critique, but also empowers you to own your decisions. In front of the whole internet.

Laravel Deep Dive – Mafia Online – Contents
I will update this as I add new articles

1. Introduction
2. Dependency Inversion and Interface Segregation using Laravel’s Service Container
3. Achieving Single Responsibility with HTTP Requests in Laravel (coming soon)