By Sherri Wheeler Among the many strategic decisions a business needs to make, one which we as developers are involved with is the choice of tech stack—the tools and technologies used for software development. When choosing a backend language, PHP presents its list of strengths and weaknesses; this article examines these from a business perspective. […]

In part two, I continue chatting with the PHP 8 Release Managers about PHP Internals, preparing a new release, the evolution of the language, and where it might go in the future.

This month, “The Quest,” takes us on a quest to avoid the Big Ball of Mud. We’ll begin by learning what the Big Ball of Mud is. Our quest will discover that Domain-Driven Design (DDD) can be our solution, but the current state of the art does not quite (to the best of my knowledge) […]

In our documentation at work, there are a few places where we list things as strings but look suspiciously like Boolean values. This realization sparked a discussion at work around data types, but not the one most developers tend to have. This discussion was not about strict versus dynamic typing, but more about what kind […]

In our last issue, we looked at a problem from game development—generating random loot with different rarities. We saw multiple solutions, including a common technique used in many games. Our new puzzle asked us to calculate dice rolls for tabletop games.

I’ve been contributing to Community Corner for a few months, so you would know by now that I am not a journalist and that I love PHP. I love coding with it, talking to people about it, and meeting new people involved with it. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a lot of fantastic […]

There is a huge emphasis put on the code maintainability, and for a good reason. The programming industry is rife with what we like to term “legacy code,” which boils down to code that solves a business problem, but we, as the current maintainers, do not understand. No language is safe from this problem.

In our last issue, we looked at multiple solutions for the Fibonacci math problem. We saw a common recursion gotcha when one of our solutions caused PHP to timeout on modest inputs. We then took a more fun direction and presented a problem from game development: randomizing the quality of loot generation. Let’s look at […]

When facing a challenging problem, you want a flexible codebase that adapts quickly. Object-oriented programming facilitates it by giving you the power through inheritance, encapsulating code in reusable objects, and generally making them work for your application as you see fit. However, we can find flexibility in other programming approaches.

Each installment of PHP Puzzles presents a small coding exercise typical of those we might encounter in a job interview, or on a coding challenge website. In the following month, we’ll look at a couple of possible solutions for today’s puzzle. In our last issue, we solved the very common Factorial math problem to get […]