World Backup Day

Backups For Beginners

By Scott Keck-Warren

Backups are one of those things we developers don’t like to think about until there’s a problem, and then it’s too late. Anyone who’s ever accidentally deleted something only to find out the only good backup is weeks or months old can tell you how important it is that we always have backups as part of our disaster recovery plan. We can’t let them slip because not having a functioning backup can cost our companies untold hours and thousands of dollars recreating data. The worse part is apologizing to our users that their data is gone.

How to Hack your Home with a Raspberry Pi – Part 3

By Ken Marks

Welcome back to another installment of ‘How to Hack your Home with a Raspberry Pi.’ At the end of this article, you should have a Raspberry Pi running a full LAMP stack that can serve up web pages to any browser on your home network. So grab your Raspberry Pi and a beverage of your choice so you can continue this journey with me as we install some more software!

PHP Puzzles: Finding Prime Factors

By Oscar Merida

We’re building on a previous puzzle for finding integer factors. In this article, we look at how to find prime factors before turning to one more puzzle involving integer division.

Education Station: Software History is Licensing

By Chris Tankersley

The world of computers is an odd place. When I was younger, all we had was a Tandy Color Computer 2 because it was cheap. When we upgraded to an IBM running DOS, it was a major upgrade. I grew up during a time when the “family computer” was a common idea just because of cost. Now I walk around with a watch that is more powerful than most of those family computers, and it talks to my phone. And both of those integrate seamlessly with my tablet. The amount of computing power just around me as I type these words would have astounded seven-year-old me with that CoCo 2.

The Workshop: Queues with Horizon

By Joe Ferguson

In the January 2022 edition, my friend Chris Tankersley wrote Education Station: [Background Queues](https://phpa.me/background-queues), a fantastic primer for using background queues, or workers with your PHP application. This month we will implement [Laravel Horizon](https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/horizon), a dashboard monitor for your Redis queues.

DDD Alley: Better Late Than Never

By Edward Barnard

Last month, we created “role-based lookups” with “When You Know the Pattern.” Database-related code can be difficult to unit test, and once unit tests are written, they can be difficult and time-consuming to maintain. This month we’ll carefully look at this problem and possible solutions. We’ll walk through the test suite after extensive refactoring to keep it clear and expressive.

Security Corner: Understanding Supply Chain Security

By Eric Mann

In the physical world, it’s relatively easy to understand what a supply chain looks like—the security of physical goods in transit is a straightforward concept. This kind of security in the digital world can be harder to recognize but is just as critical.

PSR Pickup: PSRs – Improving the Developer Experience

By Frank Wallen

PHP-FIG (PHP Framework Interoperability Group) is the group of developers and projects coming together to define/suggest and maintain PSRs (PHP Standard Recommendations) for how frameworks and components communicate and work with each other. In PSR Alley, we will talk about the PSRs and how they are applied in, or affect, the real world of developing with PHP. The first ones we’ll look at are *PSR-0 Autoloading Standard*, *PSR-4 Autoloading*, and *PSR-1 Basic Coding Standard*.

finally{}: I Just Can’t

By Beth Tucker Long

**ding – Subject line: Reminder to complete your student’s school registration.** A new email arrives. *Right, I need to get that done as soon as I finish work for the day.* **ding – Subject line: Your domain names expire in 3 days.** *Ack, I forgot to renew those last week. I need to get that done before they expire.* **ding – Subject line: Did you get my email from last week?** *What email?* (scroll, scroll, scroll) *Oh, there it is. Not sure how I missed that…*

March 2022