How to Hack your Home with a Raspberry Pi – Part 1

By Ken Marks

In September of 2017, I gave a talk called: ‘Hack your Home with a Raspberry Pi’ at the Madison PHP Conference. It was a half-day tutorial, walking participants through the process of configuring a Raspberry Pi, installing a LAMP stack on it, connecting a sensor, and ultimately having it send a text message to their phone. by Ken Marks

• Read PDF

Five Strategies for Becoming an Effective Mentor

By Olivia Liddell

One of the most pivotal moments in my career happened about ten years ago. I was a few weeks away from finishing the teacher residency program that I had been a part of for the past year. As part of the final phase of the program, the director gave me a call to inform me of my permanent classroom placement for the following year. by Olivia Liddell

Introducing FilterIterators

By Mauro Chojrin

Iterators over collections provide a clean separation of concerns. Filter Iterators are a great way to abstract the logic of your selecting sub-sets of Collections elements. by Mauro Chojrin

PHP Puzzles: Infamous Fizz Buzz

By Oscar Merida

Let’s start the year looking at a classic interview question—Fizz Buzz. It’s misused to screen applicants and may not be testing for what it thinks it is. Nonetheless, it doesn’t hurt to be prepared if you encounter it. We’ll look at various approaches to solve it. by Oscar Merida

Education Station: Background Queues

By Chris Tankersley

Web developers, especially PHP developers, have it easy. We write applications that take a web request, do some work, and return some sort of response. When we do our job properly, we return that request as fast as possible. According to HubSpot, the first four seconds of a page load are the most important. After that, conversion rates start to drop off rapidly. Older stats show that users would begin to leave at the three-second mark. by Chris Tankersley

The Workshop: Apache and PHP – Back to Basics

By Joe Ferguson

This month we’re diving into Apache and PHP configuration to better understand the relationship between the web (HTTP) server and our application. When getting started with PHP, it’s quite common for tutorials and guides to skip over the webserver and focus more on the language aspects. PHP developers need to have a strong understanding of how the webserver executes their code. As requests and responses being handled by a server are the primary purpose of web applications. We’re going to install Apache, PHP, and review configuration for ensuring our application not only functions well but leverages Virtual Hosts to serve multiple applications. by Joe Ferguson

DDD Alley: Turning to Domain-Driven Design

By Edward Barnard

We begin our implementation of Domain-Driven Design with simple refactoring. We’ll take a close look at what complexity might be hidden within the expected implementation. That observation will guide us in refactoring toward Domain-Driven Design. by Edward Barnard

Security Corner: The Terrifying Scale of a Security Bug

By Eric Mann

A remote code execution vulnerability discovered in the widely used Log4J library exposed billions of machines to malicious actors in December. Unfortunately, fixing this bug was not straightforward and left much of the Internet exposed to bad actors for over a week. by Eric Mann

Community Corner: Interview with PHP 8.1 Release Manager Patrick Allaert

By Eric Van Johnson

PHP 8.1 is now the current version of PHP, and there is a new team behind managing the releases of PHP 8.1. For this release of PHP, the Internals groups decide to do something different. There is still a veteran release manager for PHP 8.1, namely, Joe Watkins (@krakjoe). But instead of only having one new release manager, “rookie,” they elected two additional people to manage the release. This month we speak to one of those rookie release managers, Patrick Allaert. When Patrick isn’t coding PHP or C, you might find him dancing Forró/Salsa/Bachata or kitesurfing on the ocean. by Eric Van Johnson

finally{}: Experts or Out-of-touch?

By Beth Tucker Long

After talking to someone about ideas for new security education, I popped over to check out the latest OWASP Top Ten list. A quote on their homepage stood out to me: This category represents the scenario where the security community members are telling us this is important, even though it’s not illustrated in the data at this time. https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/ by Beth Tucker Long