Despite the promise of a “paperless” office, we still need to create documents that print and render nearly-identically across devices and operating systems. PDFs have filled this niche nicely for end-users, but if you need to generate PDFs with PHP programmatically, the options are overwhelming. How do you choose? In this series, we’ll investigate the solutions at our disposal and the pros and cons of each.

Eric, John, and Oscar discuss Symfony 4, legacy code, and interview Karl Hughes about what it takes to run a user group.

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 […]

Working with Elasticsearch, defensive coding practices, Maura Teal on her WordPress talks, preventing burn out, and more in Episode 22.

Memoization is another form of memory use. I see it regularly used for improving application performance, but it’s also used to improve compiler performance. To learn the concept, we’ll use a PHP project with database tables, then look at other ways to use the technique.

Eric, John, and Oscar are back post-php[tek] to discuss the June 2019 issue.

In Episode 20 Eric, John, and Oscar are back talking about PHP, and the May 2019 issue. Topics John and Eric discuss Serverless PHP, Deploying ReactPHP Applications, Mysql 8.o, and more. Oscar talks about using Composer with Magento and similar experiences with Drupal, network tunneling with ngrok.com, and a reminder that the php[world] Call for […]

In recent years, a different way to build applications has arisen called serverless computing. This term is not a good name; I’m reminded of the adage that there are two hard problems in programming: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. Serverless computing as a name implies no servers, but there are servers—you don’t think about them though. A better way to think about it is that the servers and the management of them are abstracted away and the provider manages the allocation of resources, not the application architect.

Eric, John, and Oscar record together again to discuss the April 2019 issue on the new frontend fundamentals, php[tek], and quite a lot more about web browsers than anyone anticipated.

We’ve re-imagined the format of php[tek] this year in response to feedback from past attendees. We kept hearing a desire for a more cohesive, curated conference schedule which allows speakers to dig deeper into a topic than a general 50-minute talk permits. So we’re organizing the talks into eight focused tracks, where one talk builds […]