Object-oriented programming is full of suggestions on how to do things. One of the core tenets of object-oriented programming is abstracting “things”—or modeling them—into code via some idea of nouns and verbs.

Last month I talked about how, despite PHP arrays being one of the nicest things about the language, there were times where real data structures could help. There were various ways to use arrays as more “traditional” data structures, as well as the options provided by the Standard PHP Library, or SPL. If you can […]

I’ll admit, one of the best things I love about PHP is that I don’t have to deal with all sorts of different ways to deal with data. At the base of the language we have nice primitives like strings, integers, floats, and Booleans, and we also have one of the most flexible structures known to programmers—the PHP Array. The array itself wears many hats. If you are coming from other languages, you have to think about the structure of ordered data in a few different ways. The reason for this tends to deal mostly with how we need to represent data and how we manipulate data. Different data has different requirements.

The very first thing you need to do when something goes wrong is to get a good handle on the situation and find out what’s wrong. Many users first instincts are to get frustrated and say, “This is broken!” and expect you to figure it out. While there can be lots of places to look, narrowing down the possible causes can help greatly.

The argument over strict typing is nothing new in PHP. When the PHP 7.0 release was under development and the idea of scalar type hinting came up, there were developers on all sides with opinions on how it should work. While PHP 7.0 could introduce backward compatibility breaks, introducing strict typing had the potential to […]

Legacy code is an unfortunate fact every developer has to face. Whether you subscribe to the idea that legacy code is just inherited code, untested code, or that it’s code which has reached a certain age, the grim reality of software development is that code lives, for a very long time. See how to tombstone […]

The tech industry is always awash with new ideas that are actually old. One which gained traction in the last ten years is the idea of “DevOps.” This term is the combination of “Development” and “Operations” and is meant to show these two roles can be combined for more efficiency.

Meanwhile, the days where employees stay with the same company 20-30 years are long gone. We move around or move on from contract to contract. For many of us, this means formal job interviews. Many of those interviews include coding challenges; that can be a problem. Let’s talk about that!

The more things change, the more they remain the same. We’re taking a 30th Anniversary Tour of the Morris Worm. We’ll find that the same attacks and defenses remain in use today. It behooves us all, as modern software developers, to understand our history.

This month we have a “cookbook” of producer-consumer programming examples. We work through a complete example of timing production web page loads. We then consider techniques for message versioning, funneling, and feature migration.