A maintenance month
After a very busy January, February was quiet. The commit log shows four changes, and none of them is a headline feature. We think it is worth saying so plainly: real projects have slow months, and pretending otherwise would make the rest of this journal less believable.
The most useful change was to file storage. We reorganised how the application stores uploaded files so that they live in cloud object storage rather than on a single machine. Payroll later depended on this for company logos, generated payslips and export files, all of which need to be available wherever the application is running.
Small pieces for later
We also added the database table that Laravel uses for in-app notifications. It was groundwork rather than a finished feature, but it meant that later modules could tell users when something needed their attention without each one inventing its own approach.
Finally, we tried a package for managing subscriptions. It did not fit how we wanted to work, and it was removed early the following month. Small experiments like this are cheap when they are caught quickly, and the habit of trying something, judging it honestly and backing it out if needed shows up again and again in this history.
Looking back, February marks the end of the general-purpose phase. In March the team cleared out most of what the codebase had carried for the earlier project and set up the first packages that carry the Mintage name.
This article was written from Mintage Payroll’s commit history for February 2021. See Mintage Payroll today