Mark Niebergall

Mark Niebergall is a security-minded PHP software engineer with over a decade of hands-on experience with PHP projects. He is the Utah PHP User Group Co-Organizer and often speaks at user groups and conferences. Mark has a Masters degree in MIS, is CSSLP and SSCP cybersecurity certified, and volunteers for (ISC)2 exam development. Mark enjoys going for long runs and teaching his five boys how to push buttons and use technology.

twitter: @mbniebergall

Articles

Stacking Up Middleware

By Mark Niebergall

The shift towards API driven design has brought in all-new design patterns from traditional Model-View-Controller (MVC). Middleware pipelines are geared to address the complexities and nuances that arise with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This article delves into popular frameworks, discusses strategies for adding layers, handling authentication and authorization, and implications for projects. Learn all about middleware and discover how you can leverage middleware layers in your development

Published in Under the Scope, September 2020

Defensive Coding Crash Course

By Mark Niebergall

Ensuring software reliability, resiliency, and recoverability is best achieved by practicing effective defensive coding. Take a crash course in defensive coding with PHP as we cover attack surfaces, input validation, canonicalization, secure type checking, external library vetting, cryptographic agility, exception management, automatic code analysis, peer code reviews, and automated testing. Learn some helpful tips and tricks and review best practices to help defend your project

Published in Find the Way With Elasticsearch, July 2019 —Available for Free

Debugging PHP With Xdebug

By Mark Niebergall

Debugging in PHP can be tedious and prone to errors when using var_dump and echo statements. Xdebug is a powerful tool that can be used for debugging PHP more effectively and for gaining better insights into what an application is actually doing. In this article we will cover setting up an PhpStorm with Xdebug, how to use various browsers to enable debugging that will let you step into code and see variable values live, and how to extend those debugging capabilities into the command line interface (CLI), REST APIs, and SOAP clients.

Published in Masterful Code Management – August 2018, August 2018