Edward Barnard

Ed Barnard had a front-row seat when the Morris Worm took down the Internet, November 1988. He was teaching CRAY-1 supercomputer operating system internals to analysts as they were being directly hit by the Worm. It was a busy week! Ed continues to indulge his interests in computer security and teaching software concepts to others.

twitter: @ewbarnard

Articles

Education Station: Interview Coding Challenges

By Edward Barnard

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!

Education Station: The Day the Internet Died

By Edward Barnard

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.

Education Station: Producer-Consumer Programming Techniques

By Edward Barnard

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.

Education Station: Producer-Consumer Programming

By Edward Barnard

Producer-consumer programming is an excellent technique for offloading work from your main application. You can scale resources to meet increased demand. You can smooth out spikes by placing your backlog in a queue. You can set aside long-running tasks such as thumbnail generation. We’ll develop a simple CakePHP application that produces and consumes via a free CloudAMQP (RabbitMQ) account. Although we use CakePHP, the principles are universal to any modern PHP framework.

Education Station: That’s Logical

By Edward Barnard

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.

Education Station: Build an Algorithm

By Edward Barnard

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.

Education Station: Build an API, Part Three

By Edward Barnard

In this series, we look at using Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and specification by example to develop a RESTful API. In Part Three, we focus on the HTTP verbs directing any RESTful API. Understanding where and when to use HTTP verbs will inform how we structure our API and affects the developer experience.

Education Station: Build an API, Part Two

By Edward Barnard

In this series, we look at using Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and specification by example to develop a RESTful API. In Part Two we introduce Behavior-Driven Development as a way of communicating with non-developers, our stakeholders.

Education Station: Build an API, Part One

By Edward Barnard

In this series, we look at using Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and specification by example to develop a RESTful API with JSON-formatted request and response. In Part One we introduce these concepts, design our database, and implement a minimal working API.

Internal Apparatus: How PHP Works: Show Me the Code

By Edward Barnard

We all use PHP; it’s open source, which means anyone can take a look. However, it’s not as easy as with the various PHP frameworks, because PHP is written in C and makes heavy use of C preprocessor macros. We’ll see it’s relatively readable once we know how and where to look.

Internal Apparatus: Beginning the Deep Dive

By Edward Barnard

Understanding C code requires far more than understanding the language syntax—we need to understand the environment and context. Along the way, we’ll learn more about how computers work. We’ll be taking a deep dive into how PHP implements arrays. We begin our deep dive this month by looking at the PHP executable file and PHP’s packed hash table.

Twitter for PHP Development

By Edward Barnard

The Internet Research Agency indictment carries strong implications for the software development community. We’ll educate ourselves by drilling down into examples of computational propaganda with Twitter. Then, we’ll relax and learn how we can use Twitter to further our professional development by connecting to the greater PHP community.

Education Station: What is a Real Programmer?

By Edward Barnard

We expect a shortage of software engineering talent in 2018. Those with a deeper understanding of how things work will most benefit from the shortage. Let’s bring in 2018 by taking on one of those fundamentals, binary arithmetic, but with a twist: We’ll use XOR and AND logic for our implementation.

Education Station: Shifting and Masking with a Side of Crypto

By Edward Barnard

The basics can be tricky. This month we take a careful walk-through of a few lines of cryptographic code in PHP. This leads us through the difference between ones’ complement and two’s complement representation. We achieve weirdness by combining logical AND with integer addition.

Internal Apparatus: Hash Table Collisions

By Edward Barnard

We continue our deep dive into how PHP implements arrays as hash tables. We’ll see how the collision chain works. We’re not ready to dig into the C implementation just yet, so we’ll see how to build and rebuild the hash table using PHP code. This month we’re learning how PHP arrays are stored and manipulated; next month we’ll see the C code itself.