Thank you to all the 2022 contributors!
This year’s event was an awesome collection of writings. Catch up on any submissions you might have missed below!
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Make it a marathon, not a sprint
The year was 2002; I was working as technical support for an internet provider. It wasn’t always busy, and although playing MUD and hanging out on IRC were some of the ways I and my colleagues used to pass time, eventually, I started blogging, and that is when things started to change. Looking at what…
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Making PHP the language you want it to be
Have you ever had an idea about how to improve PHP? Or maybe you yearn for a feature that another language has, that hasn’t made it into PHP yet? The great news is that PHP is improving with every release. One day the PHP feature you wish for might make it into the language. If…
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Three developer super powers you may not realise that you have
If you’re reading this, then I assume you do software development of some sort. You write code. You “make sand think” as I heard someone describe it. If you write code then I believe you have some super powers. You may not know it. Or you may not believe it. But I know it, and…
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Keep your documentation up-to-date
Where tests have a significant and unpopular position in the workflow of most developers, some of us skip that part because we have no time to do it, and documentation is even less popular. “Documentation is a waste of time”; “Most documentation is already outdated before it is written”;“Once written, we will never look at…
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Zombies 3 and PHP
I’m weirdly enamoured with the Disney Plus teen musical movie, “Zombies 3.” Mostly though, it’s not the movie itself. It’s this interview with the Asian, non-binary, queer actor Terry Hu who portrays a non-binary alien main character in the movie: In the interview, Terry says: “Holistic representation or true representation of a group or community…
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Maintenance Art
While catching up with PHP 8.2 recently, I had a chuckle at how deprecated features get top billing — as they should! Knowing well ahead of time what things that work today will break in future versions of PHP keeps developers on their toes. With the mortality of your code in view, thanks to the…
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Raising the Bar
I started my professional career with PHP in the year 2000. Professional in the sense that I got paid to program, not so much because of my knowledge of PHP. I wasn’t a newbie, though, or at least I didn’t feel like one. At this point, I had accumulated around ten years of experience programming…
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Phel Lang, a native LISP for PHP
For more than two years, Jens and Chema have worked hard to create what Phel is today. Phel is a Functional Programming language that compiles to PHP. It is a dialect of Lisp inspired by Clojure and Janet. What does Phel look like? Here is an example of some Phel code from the website. Why Phel? It is the result of many failed attempts to…
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A Personal Journey: Launching a SaaS as a WordPress agency founder
Note: This was originally tweeted as a far-too-long-should-have-been-a-blog-post thread on Twitter. It was the first thread of several (second, third, fourth) threads leading up to the launch of Otherboard.com. Very minor edits have been made. There’s almost certainly a fancy German word for the feeling when you are days away from launching your first SaaS…
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Versioning a PHP API with Composer
This year I’ve had the opportunity to learn and grow in many different ways. Recently I’ve had reason to dive into the benefits and trade-offs that come with a formal versioning convention. As part of this I’ve been spending time returning to the fundamentals of versioning. One thing I always find useful is revisiting fundamentals…
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Work smarter by taking cues from the music-learning process
In 2019, after several years as a cellist and orchestra manager, I started learning to code. While I didn’t have a technical background, I found I had developed a number of coding-adjacent skills through studying music. One practice I’ve adopted from music learning has helped me deliver code with fewer mistakes, better choices, and more…
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Progress is Never Permanent
“Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.” – Zadie Smith, Feel Free: Essays As anyone who has worked on a software project of any size or complexity can tell you, things just have a tendency to… decay. The more people work on it,…
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Creating music with PHP
As Wikipedia tells us, PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. And that’s true. For example, WordPress – CMS that powers 40% of the web, runs on PHP and JavaScript. But there is more to it. PHP is a handy programming language suitable for prototyping ideas quickly. As I’ve always been interested…
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Share your stories!
This year I was lucky enough to be a speaker at the SymfonyCon 2022 conference in Disneyland Paris. I was honored to be invited to this very special edition and made a brand new talk for this conference: 7 Lessons You Can Learn From Disney Movies. Yes, it was completely themed to the location of…
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Why I built Suphle, an opinionated PHP framework, in 2022
Among all the new PHP projects you’d expect to see in 2022/23, I doubt another PHP framework is one of them. In fact, you probably already have your favorite one serving all your needs. So I’m not here to tell you why you should use my framework. Rather, this is the story of what inspired me…
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Security doesn’t have to be boring
When it comes to building your own apps, setting development priorities, spending budgets, and generally getting stuff done, security is usually considered to be boring and unnecessary. This is especially true when you’re working with a modern PHP framework like Laravel or CodeIgniter. Security is included out of the box so you don’t need to…
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An Ode to PHP
I have been working with PHP for many years, mostly as a side language. Once upon a time in, on an island far, far away, I did try to get a SaaS business going based on a PHP stack but alas it suffered from a lack of customers and we eventually bowed out. It did…
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The PHP 8.2 Release Managers
PHP 8.2 will be released on December 8, and many articles have already been written about the new features in this version, So let’s talk about the people involved in releasing PHP — the release managers. Who are the release managers? I joined the release manager team in May of this year, a lot of…
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Evolving PHP
With 2022, I see PHP’s cost as becoming prohibitive. Here’s why. PHP continued to evolve in 2022. That’s a good thing. PHP also scored an “own goal” near the end of 2022. This latter concern is not at all obvious. Here’s my view of the situation. Double-digit bugs Do you remember the Year 2000 problem?…
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Discomfort is where we grow!
For the vast majority of my professional career, I’ve been working with mostly just PHP, and felt pretty confident with it. However, the longer I worked with just PHP, the more afraid I became of branching out into new things. I watched as the backend ecosystem started changing – it seemed like every one was picking up…
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Knit 1, Perl 1
Knitting is computing. Bear with me, I’ll explain. Computing is using certain hardware, following a set of instructions to manipulate input and produce a desired result. Knitting is using certain hardware, following a set of instructions to manipulate input and produce a desired result. See, it’s the same! Knitting ‘hardware’ is needles, our ‘input’ is…
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A walk in the forest of worktrees
Lately, I’ve been working on migrating Doctrine ORM to PHP 8 syntax. To that end, I’ve been using Rector, an automated refactoring tool. It comes with a set of rules called LevelSetList::UP_TO_PHP_81 which makes sure you use the most modern syntax to do something as long as it is supported on PHP 8.1. UP_TO_PHP_81 is…
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Being a developer is not the same as knowing how to code
In 2016 I decided that I didn’t want to be an IT-coordinator anymore. At the time I couldn’t deal with the politics involved in that function. You know, co-workers protesting the changes that you have to make happen and stuff like that. After some talks with job – and career – advisors I decided to…
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All I want for Christmas
Let’s set aside all practical concerns for a moment — it’s Christmas, after all. If you could choose — freely choose: what would you change about PHP? Would you want generics or the pipe operator? Maybe you’d like to see consistent function signatures or get rid of the dollar sign. Type aliases, scalar objects, autoloading…
