This is part four of my series, The DX Files: Improving Drupal Developer Experience. I started this series with fairly simplistic suggestions. They proved not very popular and some of them I agree were of questionable benefit due to PHP’s nature. I was pleased to discover, however, that they nevertheless had quite an impact on raising the visibility of “Developer Experience” within the Drupal community. I am therefore ready to move on to some of the more complex DX issues in Drupal.

The most important DX change Drupal needs to make is switching from a form-driven model to an API-driven model. There are many parts to such a change. Today’s topic: static caching.

This is part two of my series, The DX Files: Improving Drupal Developer Experience.

Many Drupal APIs accept a boolean argument (TRUE or FALSE) to determine some behavior. I believe that practice should be banned in all but exceptional cases, instead using a defined constant with a descriptive name.

Here is a perfect example from Drupal core:

Now, quick! Who can tell me what passing FALSE as the second argument and TRUE as the third argument means?