Sherri Wheeler

Sherri is a web software developer and business professional with over 15 years of experience working with PHP. She currently operates her company Avinus Web Services, and for fun she creates games and open source software. When not at the computer you’ll find her camping, swimming and making forts with her husband and three sons in Ontario, Canada. Connect with her on Twitter.

twitter: @SyntaxSeed

Articles

Illuminating Smart Light Bulbs With PHP

By Sherri Wheeler

PHP is becoming more popular for controlling Internet Of Things devices like home automation, cameras, doorbells, and even light bulbs. In this article, we’ll shed some literal and figurative light on controlling Philips Hue smart light bulbs using an existing PHP library.

Published in Another Bright Idea, June 2022

PHP Puzzles: Rock Paper Scissors

By Sherri Wheeler

This month, we have a try at writing a function to play the hand gesture game Rock Paper Scissors. It serves as an example of a single function that takes in a distinct set of inputs to return an output based on pre-defined rules.

Published in Busy Worker Bees, April 2021

PHP Puzzles: Hashtag Creation

By Sherri Wheeler

This month, we move on from our grid and maze-based puzzles to another stand-alone puzzle parsing strings. We’ll take a string of text containing whitespace-separated words and turn them into hashtags for social media posts.

Published in Lambda PHP, March 2021

PHP Puzzles: Environmental Noise

By Sherri Wheeler

This month, we wrap up our grid maze theme by adding some noise or empty space to our grid that already contains a path from the entrance to the exit. The idea is to approximate an environment map for a tabletop game.

Published in Dealing with Data, February 2021

PHP Puzzles: Staircase Path

By Sherri Wheeler

Welcome to a new year! In our last puzzle, we started building a collection of related functions to output and navigate through a grid, starting with printing our grid to a command-line using dark and light shade characters to indicate wall or open path, respectively. In this article, we look at plotting a route from the entrance (top-left) to the exit (bottom-right) of our grid.

Published in Newfangled Views, January 2021

PHP Puzzles: Grid Mapping

By Sherri Wheeler

In our last issue, we plotted a list of compass directions onto a grid to determine a destination x,y point. In this article, we look at generating a simple output for a colored grid.

Published in PHP 8 Bits and Git, December 2020

PHP Puzzles: Destination Point

By Sherri Wheeler

In our last issue, pruned a set of directions to remove values that cancel each other out. It was an exercise in cleaning data, an often crucial step before importing it or processing it elsewhere. In this article, we look at plotting those directions on a grid.

Published in SOLID Foundations, November 2020

PHP Puzzles: Improved Directions

By Sherri Wheeler

In our last issue, we simulated population growth—a component of many popular games. In this article, we look at pruning redundant items from a list of directions.

Published in Running Parallel, October 2020

PHP Puzzles: Calculating Population Growth

By Sherri Wheeler

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.

Published in Under the Scope, September 2020

PHP Puzzles: Writing a Dice Roller

By Sherri Wheeler

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.

Published in Data Discipline, August 2020

PHP Puzzles: Random Loot

By Sherri Wheeler

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 loot quality and then pose another game related puzzle.

Published in Warp Driven Development, July 2020

PHP Puzzles: Calculating Fibonacci Sequences

By Sherri Wheeler

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 ourselves warmed up. We looked at an iterative and a recursive solution. I then ask readers to solve the similar Fibonacci problem.

Published in Advanced Design & Development, June 2020

PHP Puzzles: Factorials

By Sherri Wheeler

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. Perhaps one of the most common coding puzzles, I recall this one from high school computer class&msdash;calculating a factorial.

Published in Unsupervised Learning, May 2020

The Business Of PHP

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.

Published in Machine Learning and OpenAPI, April 2020 —Available for Free