Having worked with generics in other languages, I was very grateful and thrilled to come across this RFC, as I could immediately see the tremendous benefits this would bring to the PHP ecosystem. Let’s look at how they might fit within the evolution of PHP’s type system to put us in a position to write […]

Providing a good foundation for your application pays off in the long run by reducing technical debt, finding bugs earlier, and making it faster to add features. This month we look at how generics could make your code concise, other new features you should be using, practices to keep your Laravel application easy to upgrade, […]

In this issue: Generics in PHP, Maintainable Laravel, Starting with PHP, Project Success, security code reviews, and more

In this Episode Eric van Johnson and John Congdon wrapped up recording on episode 14. Share your thoughts on the topics covered and leave a comment below. Topics Eric and John talk about stickers (again), PHP internals, understanding framework trade offs, John explains MySQL 8 window functions, burning out, sub-domain takeovers, and more. Oscar shares […]

In everyday work, it’s easy to forget just how many things are happening under the hood, how many concepts are abstracted away to make our code run and make it run efficiently. It wasn’t always the case—at first, there were languages we now call “assembly languages”—designed to faithfully represent what the CPU will execute, and […]

After designing and coding many computer games, I recently got around to designing and publishing a tabletop game. But wait, a board game is hardware! Using PHP to design a board game seems unconventional. How did that come about? Here’s the project history showing how I used PHP as a tool for rapid prototyping. Given […]

PHP 7.3 successfully passed the “feature freeze” deadline. On Aug. 1st, 2018 all features for PHP 7.3 were identified. This triggered the first PHP 7.3 beta, on the following day, and, from there, we’ll reach RC in September. It is time to review what this new PHP version has available for us, help test PHP 7.3, and get ready.

In this issue: Xdebug, Freelancing, Parsing text, MySQL Generated Columns, Gitflow, PhpStorm, and more.

There are many PHP 7 upgrade paths one could take. The sheer number of options can be paralyzing. Certainly, there are better ways than upgrading your production server to PHP 7.2 and hoping for the best (in fact, this is not a recommended upgrade path). If upgrading a legacy PHP 5.x application to PHP 7 […]

PHP 7.3 successfully passed the “feature freeze” deadline. On Aug. 1st, 2018 all features for PHP 7.3 were identified. This triggered the first PHP 7.3 beta, on the following day, and, from there, we’ll reach RC in September. It is time to review what this new PHP version has available for us, help test PHP […]