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 […]

Regular expressions, or sometimes simply called regex, represent a powerful set of tools which allow developers to split strings, perform character substitutions, and extract text based on matched patterns. The patterns, used in regular expressions, are an actual language that describe combinations of type castings and values that match the text you want to split, substitute, or extract. Regular expressions are an enormously powerful tool for the developer who understands them.

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

This month we practice working “close to the hardware.” We’ll see why this is becoming more important to today’s software developers. We’ll use the PHP bitwise operators to manipulate single-bit binary numbers. We’ll then take a more general look at ways to learn what we need to learn.

In this issue: State machines, workflows, parsing text, MySQL without SQL, Continuous Integration, self-hosted git, CakePHP, Password Authentication, Issue Tracking, Algorithms, and more.

If you have trouble making change for a dollar without a calculator, and don’t care, this article may not be for you. Otherwise, come along with me! We’ll be converting between numbering systems. We’ll create an algorithm for converting between decimal (integer) and hexadecimal numbers.

Using events and command buses, self-hosted git, design workflows, parsing text, a look at CakePHP, Composer security, and more

Writing clean code, managing technical debt, testing with Mockery, Toxic Tech, API specifications, and more.

One of the fantastic things about the PHP language is that we, the community, are constantly evolving it. If you take a look at PHP code from just a few years ago, it can appear alien compared to anything written in modern PHP today. In fact, I’ve often stated that PHP was, in fact, unique […]