Michael Schrenk

Michael Schrenk has developed software that collects and processes massive amounts of data for some of the biggest news agencies in Europe and leads a competitive intelligence consultancy in Las Vegas. He consults on information security and Big Data everywhere from Moscow to Silicon Valley, and most places in between. Mike is the author of _Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers (2012, No Starch Press)_. He is a Big Data Advisory Board Member at Rutgers University, and has lectured at journalism conferences in Belgium and the Netherlands and has created several weekend data workshops for the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Along the way, he’s been interviewed by BBC, the Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, and many others. Mike is also an eight-time speaker at the notorious DEF CON hacking conference. He may be best known for building software that over a period of a few months autonomously purchased over $13 million dollars worth of cars by adapting to real-time market conditions.

twitter: @mgschrenk

Articles

Making Executable Images

By Michael Schrenk

For most web developers, images are always static files. For PHP programmers, this doesn’t need to be the case. Executable images, created on-demand, can perform any programming task as well as functioning as standard images.

Published in DevOps Depths – January 2019, January 2019

Pro Parsing Techniques With PHP, Part Three: Using Regular Expressions

By Michael Schrenk

This article is dedicated to regular expressions. Regular expressions, or sometimes simply called regex, represent a powerful set of tools which allow developers to split strings, perform character substitutions, and extract text based on matched patterns. The patterns, used in regular expressions, are an actual language that describe combinations of type castings and values that match the text you want to split, substitute, or extract. Regular expressions are an enormously powerful tool for the developer who understands them.

Published in Masterful Code Management – August 2018, August 2018 —Available for Free

Pro Parsing Techniques with PHP, Part Two: Fault Tolerance

By Michael Schrenk

This article is part two of a three-part series on parsing text with PHP. The previous installment dealt with basic parsing techniques; particularly how parsing becomes easier when you limit your parsing toolkit to only a few, well chosen, tools that you’ll use over and over again. This article is dedicated to fault tolerant parsing techniques. This series will finish with the third article which describes how to use regular expressions.

Published in Navigating State – July 2018, July 2018

Pro Parsing Techniques With PHP, Part One: Simplifying Your Parsing Strategy

By Michael Schrenk

Something nearly every PHP developer does is develop scripts that parse, or extract, information from text documents. There are many reasons why parsing is important, ranging from scraping information from webpages, parsing email messages, searching for specific entries in text files, or to authenticate events in a log file. And while parsing text is a common activity, there is very little instruction on how to extract desired information from a text file. This is the first of a three article series on parsing text with PHP. This installment is a quick primer on how to simplify your parsing strategy.

Published in Command and Control – June 2018, June 2018