Steve Grunwell

When I was at Mailchimp, one of the hardest parts of making meaningful contributions was the total lack of type-safety; after all, it’s a decades-old monolith that predates things like scalar type-hints, enums, union & intersection types, etc.

Just about four years ago, I joined Mailchimp, the Atlanta tech darling focused on providing small businesses the tools they need to compete with the bigger players.

Update 5/29/25: After publishing this morning, Derick Rethans pointed out that this post focuses almost exclusively on line coverage.

If you’ve worked in a lot of codebases, this scenario will be familiar: somewhere in the app, we’re JSON-decoding a string, then using that to pass arguments to a method (such as a constructor).

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about helping smaller teams—especially those working with “legacy applications”—modernize their workflows.

Today we say goodbye to Shelby Marie Grunwell, a.k.a. the Greatest Dog to Ever Live, who passed away by euthanasia at about 2:20pm Eastern this afternoon.

Let’s acknowledge something right out of the gate: working with dates and times can be a slog.

A major focus of my day job right now is cleaning up the PHP in a decades-old monolith.

The last few months at work I’ve been deep in a refactoring project, cleaning up over twenty years of technical debt.

At last year’s php[tek], one of my biggest “holy cow, why haven’t I been doing this?!”