Package managers like Composer make it quick and easy to add third-party libraries to an application. Unfortunately, they can also make it easy to import code that’s not meant to run in production—and might intentionally expose certain vulnerabilities—if your development team isn’t careful.

Every successful development team has two things in common: they’ve shipped a product, and they accepted compromises to make that shipment possible. Every team and every project has technical debt. It comes with the territory when you start building software. Usually, the term “technical debt” is seen as a negative, but that’s not always true.

Developers the world over were in shock this past May as thousands of computers in the UK’s National Health System were rendered inoperable due to a malware attack. Thanks to a previously leaked vulnerability in Windows’ operating system, and the notoriously slow rate at which large enterprises apply system patches, hackers were able to infiltrate […]

Many developers confuse platforms like GitHub with tools like Git. On the one hand, this is a bit confusing for those trying to learn the terminology we use on a daily basis. On the other hand, the visibility of GitHub—and its fantastic community features—make it easier for developers to get a handle on critical elements […]

Developers often conflate two different modes of data encryption when protecting the systems on which their applications run. One is encryption at rest. The other is application-level encryption. These approaches are similar, but they are not the same. It behooves the savvy developer to understand the difference.

Last November, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) published a new list of their “top ten” application security risks (ASRs). These are the most commonly encountered coding and security issues on the web according to an industry survey and the opinion of leading developers in the field. One of the newer ASRs to make […]

By the time you read this, the PHP community should have introduced the world to the newest version of our favorite language. This latest version adds better support for type annotations, allows trailing commas in lists (just like JavaScript and other dynamic languages) and introduced several security improvements. The most notable security addition, however, is […]