Weekly roundup: universal software development rules

This week, Kevin Schroeder from Zend collected responses to his tweet asking what are the universal software development rules. My take, cited there, is that there not many universal practices that you can follow. There are many conflicting metrics to measure the quality of a software piece, and their relative importance depends on the domain in which we are in.
For example, in development of embedded systems (which do not even run on general purpose microprocessors), many "clean code" practices like Don't Repeat Yourself and Keep It Simple Stupid are subverted. We may replicate the code for an operation to parallelize it and lower the response time of the system; we may micro-optimize operators and substitute multiplications with binary shifts. Power, energy and cost of a circuit come into play more than expressiveness of the code...

These are my original articles published this week on DZone.
Practical PHP Refactoring: Add Parameter is about adding an explicit parameter to a method instead of trying to look it up in a singleton or in some other place by itself.
Eventual consistency is everywhere in the real world contains a few examples of how eventual consistency (popularized in the programming world by NoSQL solutions) make many businesses work.
Practical PHP Refactoring: Remove Parameter is about simplifying a method by removing a parameter which is not needed anymore.
Web applications with the Play framework is a primer for the usage of a clean alternative to bloated enterprise Java stacks. And it supports Scala, too.