How to Hack your Home with a Raspberry Pi – Part 4

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 will have an accelerometer data plotting application running on your Raspberry Pi. You will need to start from the beginning of the series if you want to build this project yourself.

Growing the PHP Core – One Test at a Time

By Florian Engelhardt

In September 2000, I started my vocational training at an internet agency with two teams: one doing JavaServer Pages and one doing PHP. I was assigned to the PHP team, and when presented with the language, I immediately knew that no one would ever use it. I was wrong. Today, my entire career is built on PHP. It’s time to give back to the community by writing tests for the PHP core itself!

PHP Puzzles: Making Some Change

By Oscar Merida

This article looks at a practical math problem most developers are likely to run into at some point. We’re given some amount of money and asked to figure out how to distribute it. Did you remember that computers are not very good at floating-point math?

Education Station: Which License to Choose?

By Chris Tankersley

Licensing for software, whether it is open source or not, is an integral part of releasing software. The commercialization of software has made it necessary for developers to be explicit in how users or other developers consume their software. Unfortunately, the topic of licensing is not as straightforward as many developers would like it to be.

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The Workshop: Acceptance Testing with Codeception

By Joe Ferguson

Acceptance testing is my favorite tool to reach for when working with legacy applications that may have low test quality or no tests at all. Because acceptance testing approaches the application from outside of the source code, we’re able to greatly increase test coverage without having to touch the application’s code itself. Larger teams can use acceptance tests to prove new features behave as expected. For the single developer that knows they should be writing tests but still doesn’t for whatever reason: acceptance testing can help them jump-start their application’s test suite.

DDD Alley: When the New Requirement Arrives

By Edward Barnard

When the new requirement arrives, does this mean we cram it in the best place, making our software more difficult to work with, or might we have ways to make the result cleaner than before we started? We’ll take advantage of Martin Fowler’s concept of Preparatory Refactoring.

Security Corner: Operational Security

By Eric Mann

It is remarkably easy to grow complacent in the digital world, but a lapse in security best practices inevitably leads to a lapse in security itself.

PSR Pickup: PSR 12 Extended Coding Style Standard

By Frank Wallen

In last month’s column of PSR Pickup, I talked about PSR-4 Autoloader (PSR-0 was the first Autoloader PSR) and PSR-1 Basic Coding Standard. In this month’s column, I’ll be talking about PSR-12 Extended Coding Style Standard. PSR-12 builds on PSR-1 and is significant in the number of rules it defines, most of which are formatting styles well-supported by modern IDEs.

Drupal Dab: Drupal 9 – Introduction and Installation

By Nicola Pignatelli

Hello everyone. Welcome to the first of a series of articles that will take you into the world of Drupal, one of the most popular Open Source CMS used for various installations types, from the personal blog to the corporate site up to ad hoc software to solve specific requests. Versions currently installed on the web are 7, 8, and 9.

finally{}: Tech is Taking Sides

By Beth Tucker Long

Throughout history, industries have stayed relatively neutral during wartime. Global companies especially may offer marketing-focused messages of hope and concern but keep their heads down and their tones neutral when faced with actually taking a stand against one side of a conflict. Per usual, though, the tech industry is happy to disrupt the status quo—not just taking a clear stand but putting their money and their talent where their mouth is.