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The Art of Data
This month, we dive into Libsodium, discuss gatekeeping, learn more about data access, and why even something that might be considered a “small bug” can cause massive damage.
I’m not sure how many people read these Editorials. It’s even been explained to me that this isn’t an “Editorial.” Ha, the joke’s on them; I’m not an editor, sooooo yeah. I always enjoyed reading what Oscar had to say about the articles in the month’s issues and seeing what little nuggets of knowledge he shared.
I am not sure if I have any actual words of wisdom to share, but that’s never stopped me from talking before, so I don’t see why that would change now. We’ve been talking a lot about change lately, but the reality is, “change” is what our industry is about. Sure there are personal changes. People change jobs, leave projects, organizers of User Groups move away, but our industry also changes. What we consider “good security practices” today can be viewed as a horrible implementation tomorrow. Anyone who has worked on a legacy codebase for enough time knows the feeling of looking at code and thinking, “why was it done like this? This is terrible”, then checking the commit logs and realizing they did the coding and remember, “Oh right, that is how we did this five years ago.”
In this issue, Vinícius Campitelli returns to follow up his article from last month with more cryptography talk. This month he talks specifically about *Cryptography with Libsodium*, what it is, why you should be using it, and how you should be using it. In *Exploring the Active Record Pattern,* Alexandros Gougousis discusses the popular Active Record Pattern and some of the benefits of using this pattern to handle persisting data to the backend database.
In Security Corner this month, Eric Mann takes us on a personal journey with a bug report for a package he was maintaining in his article *No Bug Too Small,* and as you can probably guess from the title, the “small bug” was a big problem. Moving on to Joe Ferguson’s *The Workshop* article *Intro to Craft CMS*, Joe talks about one of the PHP powerhouses in the CMS market, CraftCMS. Built on the Yii framework, Joe takes you from install to asset management and gets your CMS up and running in a matter of a couple of pages. *Education Station’s* Chris Tankersley returns us to our data access discussion with *Handling Data Access* and jumps into different ways to handle data access, including raw access to abstraction layers and back to data access layers. This month, Oscar Merida continues to toy with our minds and emotions in his PHP Puzzles column about *Compounding Interest.* He then challenges us with another economic puzzle to finish out the year. Also, this month, I had the pleasure to speak with Wasseem Khayratte, aka 7PHP, in this month’s *Community Corner*. I learned more about what got him involved with the PHP community and his new role as the voice behind Voices of the elePHPant. In this month’s *Here Be Dragons: Problem Space*, Edward touches on a couple of topics most of us had been through at some point in our careers, Burn Out and Gatekeeping. And in finally{} Beth Tucker Long discusses her *Roll With It* philosophy and the idea of embracing change. Thanks for being a reader and I hope you enjoy this issue.
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Transcript
Eric Van Johnson 1:08
You’re listening to the PHP podcast for November 2021, volume 20 issue 11. The art of data. I’m your host, Eric Van Johnson and with me is John Condon. Hello, Hey John, how’s it going? It’s going another issue under our belt. How’s it feel? It feels great. We’re getting better and better every month. This one definitely went a lot smoother next month that’s
John 1:33
hopefully just keeps going in that pattern. And eventually it’s like, we just roll with it.
Eric Van Johnson 1:38
Yeah, for sure works. Let’s jump into it though. This month. We have one of our feature articles cryptography with lib sodium with Phineas cavatelli. He is actually our interview podcasts we released last week. So if you’re interested, go take a look. Listen to that one. But we will move on. Yes.
John 1:57
Next we have exploring the Active Record pattern with the Alexandra’s goose, Goose goose. I always butcher his name, but I appreciate him writing for the magazine, nonetheless, goes in depth into the active record pattern, which many of us probably use, especially if you’re working with Laravel and eloquent, you’re using the Active Record pattern and just does a great job of describing what it is and how it’s used and how you can use it not necessarily within a framework. But if you’re not using a framework.
Eric Van Johnson 2:28
Yep, I did appreciate that. I am a fan of the active record. Next we have security corner with Eric bam, no bug too small. This one hits a little close to home sometimes. Yes. Yes, it does. Yeah, he takes a moment and accounts for project he used to maintain in the past where he got a small bug report that didn’t really think it was very important to for his immediate attention. It turned out that that small bug was a pretty big problem. And he had to go in there and fix it.
John 3:00
I love personal stories like this, like hearing from a real developer with real issues that they had. As soon as I read this, I wrote Eric and shared my own personal story of something kind of similar. And it’s just, it’s interesting. It’s it’s something so small turns out to be so big.
Eric Van Johnson 3:17
I agree. It’s always nice to hear, like the mistakes you make as a developer and you think I can’t believe I did that. And then you find out you know what, everybody does that. At some point. It’s very common. So yeah, I’m with you on that. One was actually
John 3:32
in the workshop. Joe Ferguson brings us an intro to craft CMS. I’m sure lots of us have used or do use a CMS and craft CMS is just another tool on your tool belt.
Eric Van Johnson 3:43
Yeah, the problem with Joe’s writing is he makes everything look like it’s so much fun. And it really kind of distracts me from getting work done. Like all of a sudden, I feel like I really need a crap CMS instance somewhere. So I need to talk about that.
John 3:58
We need to find a way to use that. Yeah. Can you make your writing less interesting?
Eric Van Johnson 4:02
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you’re into this, I mean, WordPress is another big one that the PHP community is obviously very familiar with craft CMS looks like it’s a lot of fun. CMS, those are fun. They meet a need. Yes, they do. Also last month, I had the pleasure to sit down and talk to I interviewed I’m just gonna go with his name karate, because I’m sure I will Butcher was seen. Yeah, let’s see karate, also known as seven PHP on Twitch, seven PHP, who is now the voice behind voices of the elephant. He’s doing the interviews for voices of the elephant now it was real fun talking with him. I I seen him on social media for years. You brought it up. I’ve had we’re talking about it. But a few years back, the community had gotten together in sponsored karate become to Sunshine PHP one year. I remember seeing all that happen. Now that was fun. So it was good to get a little bit more insight on who he is and what his plans are
John 5:06
definitely a great little interview at back and forth with him. It’s interesting to read things. Next we have Ed Barnard brings this problem space in is Here Be Dragons calm, it does a great job of talking about gatekeeping, and burnout in development in general, and tell some fun stories of his past. And again, those personal stories from other developers make it very make it a very interesting read.
Eric Van Johnson 5:30
Next, we have our PHP puzzles by Oscar compounding interests, and I really feel like I should pay more attention to this one. So this is a solution from last month’s exercise in around compounding interest and the amortization table. Yes, I really enjoyed these exercises, I’m happy askers stayed on board to read them, I need to find time in my life. Actually give them a try before, before he offers the solution. So, you know, try to get next month’s done,
John 6:05
it’s gonna be one more economic puzzle that he is bringing to us. So I think we should both take a crack at it and see how close we are to his solution. Before we receive it. Is it a challenge Challenge accepted? Sure. Alright, education station, Chris Tankersley brings us handling data access, and he touches on Active Record and an RM he kind of gives the basics around both of them. So the feature article delves deeper into it. But again, just a great overall look at how to handle data within an application different ways of handling data within an application, I should say, Yeah,
Eric Van Johnson 6:42
this kind of adds to our feature article around active records. Chris talks more about active records as well as data data mappers. It’s, it’s good. It’s it was a good hearty, data filled article is the art of data. Okay, so finally, we have a fun one to talk about. We’re a little late in recording this podcast. Obviously, this is for the November edition. And we are to be fully transparent recording it December 1, we apologize. But Beth Tucker long in her finally article talks about the change within communities. And one of the things she touches on was the change that the magazine recently went through with the people who were behind it mainly from my perspective, asker decided to do other things and handed it off to Java nine. Little did we know this was foreshadowing a much larger change in our community,
John 7:45
the PHP community, mainly Nikita Papa, who is viewed as the lead developer within PHP core PHP internals, was employed by JetBrains. For I want to say a couple of years being paid to work on wasn’t being paid to work on on PHP internals, which is fantastic. But as we’ve seen, time and time again, things change, change is inevitable. And Nikita decided to step away, not only from JetBrains, but from PHP in general. I guess he’s very interested in lots of languages and works on core of a couple other languages and is decided to make that his primary focus. So JetBrains has stepped up and created a PHP Foundation. And the foundation is going to be a nonprofit organization to help fund the next group of people that are going to maintain PHP, it makes sure it has a flourishing future.
Eric Van Johnson 8:38
Yep. And we’re gonna talk a little bit more about that next month, because that will be the focus of community corner next month, but just in general, let you guys know, let me Kedah know if he’s listening how much we appreciate everything he’s done for PHP, I think he’s made a lasting impact to the language and to the community. And just thanks, man. Appreciate it.
John 9:01
Definitely. Thanks for all you’ve done. And please get back to
Eric Van Johnson 9:04
include in our in our transparency theme here, PHP architect did join the PHP foundation. So we are contributors to a PHP foundation now. Yep. Again, more on that next month, next month. We will talk more about that as for this month, however, that’s going to do it for the November issue of PHP architect. We want to thank everybody for tuning in. We want to thank everybody who subscribes to PHP architect. It’s been such an exciting kind of adventure for Java nine. If you’re not subscribed to the magazine and you want to hear more about the articles we discussed in this podcast, sign up today. You can get a free magazine just by giving us creating an account and giving us your email. We’ll give you a free magazine and ideally you you like it in you want to subscribe we have both digital and print versions of the magazine plus a lot of books and more books coming definitely for November. 2021 Keep listening, keep coding and keep reading.
| Air date | December 2, 2021 |
|---|---|
| Hosted by | Eric Van Johnson, John Congdon |
| Guest(s) |
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