See the video version at https://youtu.be/Nk9ayWxkJ1M It’s an unfortunate piece of our current developer reality that a lot of our day is spent worrying about how many tokens we’re spending. Every time you send structured data to an LLM API, you’re paying for tokens. And if you’re sending arrays of similar objects as JSON, you’re […]

   Setting up a Virtual Private Server (VPS) without a firewall is asking for trouble. Ideally, you’d have a dedicated security person to handle all of this, but that’s rarely the case. One thing I always do on a fresh Linux server is configure a firewall. It used to be a real headache, but […]

   Tell me if this has ever happened to you: a user contacts support because they’re randomly seeing different order histories every time they log in. Sometimes they see their recent purchases, sometimes they see orders from years ago, and sometimes they see nothing at all. After several hours of debugging, you discover that […]

 A lot of developers spend little to no time thinking about how our code gets from being code to something that can be interacted with by the consumers of our code. There are several large components that we can affect to improve the performance of this interaction. One of them that doesn’t get much […]

 One of the more challenging pieces of maintaining applications that uses an SQL database is the fact that queries only every get more complex as the application grows. It never ever gets simpler so you start having to copy and past the same complex join into multiple places and good luck if you have […]

 If you’ve ever spent hours debugging a date-related bug only to discover that some code somewhere modified a DateTime object you thought was safe, you know the pain. DateTime in PHP is mutable, which means any code that touches your date object can silently change it, leading to bugs that are incredibly challenging to […]

 If you’re building web apps with PHP, you are almost certainly using a relational database, even if you call it “MySQL” or “Postgres” and rarely think about the theory behind it. Relational databases can be one of the unseen workhorses of our technology stack, but understanding them to a greater degree will improve your […]

     As developers in the year 2025, keeping our systems and applications secure is of the utmost importance. One of the most common ways that attackers can make our applications less secure is by using a class of vulnerability called Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). XSS allows an attacker to inject malicious client-side scripts into […]