php[architect] — January 2015

At some point in your career, you’re likely to consider—if you haven’t done so already—striking out on your own and being your own boss. Ideally it’s a deliberate process. However you go about it, it helps to be informed about the risk, rewards, and details you have to consider when starting a business. Building a company from scratch can test your patience, stretch your skills, and keep you up at night but the benefit is that you are in the driver seat. You have the freedom to set your own goals for professional development and find interesting clients or projects to work on.

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Get Off the Freelance Roller Coaster!

Freelancing can be at once both liberating and terrifying. The freedom and satisfaction resulting from growing your own business is without comparison. These strategies for growing a freelance consultancy have helped me increase the consistency of my workflow, and they and make freelancing the exceptionally enjoyable and rewarding undertaking that it can be. I think they can help you as well. by Yitzchok Willroth

Choose Your Own Adventure—Freelancer or Founder?

You know you like working for yourself, and could not imagine working an office job ever again. More opportunities are opening up for you as a freelance developer and at some point you have to decide if you are a freelancer or a founder. In this article, I’ll talk about the pros and cons of being a freelancer versus building a company, explain what you need to know when you make this decision, and how to execute either choice. by Joshua Warren

PHP and OS Communication

PHP is a cross-platform language. This article reminds you about how different operating systems behave differently and how PHP itself (like any program) uses the OS services. After reading this article, you’ll have a better perspective on how PHP links with the OS. by Julien Pauli

An Introduction to NodeJS

NodeJS has rapidly gained popularity, and with good reason. It’s got a fairly low barrier to entry and a huge community of third-party modules available. Couple that with the fact that it’s good at a lot of things other languages such as PHP aren’t great at, and we start to see why it’s so popular. by Michael Heap

Education Station: Getting More Advanced with the FreeAgent API

I thought I’d start off the year by revisiting the FreeAgent API, which we first looked at back in the June 2014 issue. In this month’s column, we’re going to look at expenses, and trial balances. And just for a bit of fun, we’re going to see how to create, update, and delete invoices. by Matthew Setter

Laravel Tips: Non-Destructive Session Renewal

Losing the information entered into a form after submitting it and finding out that your session has expired is frustrating. In this article, we’ll fix that problem with the help of Laravel’s support for session handling and routing. by Dirk Merkel

Leveling Up: Using a Debugger

In our first Leveling Up column, we’re going to talk about something that should be a go-to tool in every developer’s toolbox: debugging. We’re going to talk about moving beyond var_dump, print_r, and console.log to use Xdebug to help you quickly gain insight into what your code is doing and how to make it work like it should. by David Stockton

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Community Corner: January 2015

What’s coming up in the New Year? Prediction: 2015 will be the Year of Security, one way or another. by Joe Devon

Wisdom as a Service World Tour

Yitzchok Willroth, better known as @coderabbi on Twitter and throughout the PHP Community, is embarking on an epic trek that he’s dubbed his Wisdom as a Service World Tour. I had a chance to ask him a few questions about his tour, and he’s also promised to send us photos and updates from his journey so that we can follow along in the months ahead. by Oscar Merida

finally{} The Gas Station Bathroom

There is a topic that has come up multiple times recently, and definitely hits home with me, as it reflects the mentality (and tension) at multiple small companies where I’ve worked over the years. At a recent user group meeting this topic was raised again and the perfect analogy was formulated. I wanted to share that with you now. by Eli White