PHP Alive and Kicking – Episode 11 – Bert De Swaef
Key Takeaways
- Expertise in PHP development transcends basic programming skills.
- Comprehensive understanding of asynchronous programming and SOLID principles enhances code quality.
- PHP’s “alive and kicking” status proves its adaptability and ongoing relevance in web development.
- Bert De Swaef emphasizes the importance of PHP in enterprise solutions and long-term projects.
- Tools like Composer and PHPUnit are essential for modern PHP development workflows.
Introduction to PHP Concepts
timestamp: 00:19
PHP’s ongoing relevance in the development world is affirmed by its adaptability. Bert De Swaef emphasizes:
“PHP remains a key player in both small-scale and enterprise-level projects thanks to its flexibility and robust ecosystem.”
Structured development in PHP leverages key concepts and tools, critical for maintaining productivity and code quality:
Asynchronous Programming
timestamp: 06:21
Asynchronous programming is pivotal in PHP for managing I/O-bound tasks efficiently. It allows developers to write non-blocking code, making applications responsive and scalable.
With asynchronous programming, PHP can manage concurrent tasks without waiting for each to complete, making it perfect for high-load applications.
PHP in Enterprise Solutions
timestamp: 11:53
PHP’s strength in enterprise solutions lies within its expansive library of tools and frameworks. Bert details how PHP encourages efficient development in complex environments:
Enterprise-grade applications benefit from PHP’s resilience and its vast collection of frameworks, such as Laravel and Symfony, which provide the absolute flexibility needed for scaling.
Advantages noted:
Scalability: Capabilities to handle extensive scaling requirements with optimized performance.
Maintainability: Ease of code management and updating due to robust framework architecture.
Community Support: A vibrant community ensures rapid issue resolution and continuous improvement.
The Role of Testing
timestamp: 21:22
Testing is a cornerstone of high-quality PHP development, underlying the importance of consistent and structured testing processes:
Testing is the backbone that supports reliable application functionality, guaranteeing each change maintains system integrity.
Emphasized tools such as PHPUnit streamline integration into workflows.
Advanced PHP Practices
timestamp: 26:50
Modern PHP development encompasses advanced techniques for enhanced efficiency and code management:
Employing robust design patterns and architecture not only fosters enhanced, maintainable code but also aligns with industry standards for effective PHP programming.
PHP Architect Social Media:
X: https://x.com/phparch
Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com
Discord: https://discord.phparch.com
Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/
Streams:
Partner
This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
Displace
Infrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
PHPScore
Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore
Honeybadger.io
Honeybadger helps you deploy with confidence and be your team’s DevOps hero by combining error, uptime, and performance monitoring in one simple platform. Check it out at honeybadger.io
Music Provided by Epidemic Sound
Listen
Podcast (episodes): Play in new window | Download | Subscribe
Transcript
PHP Alive and Kicking – Episode 11: Bert De Swaef
Show: PHP Alive and Kicking Podcast
Show Summary
In this episode of PHP Alive and Kicking, Bert De Swaef joins the hosts for a lively discussion about PHP’s continued evolution, his approach to mentoring developers, and the importance of building sustainable open source projects. They explore lessons from years of professional PHP experience and share insights on how collaboration keeps the community thriving.
Transcript
[04:26] Hello and welcome to peach pee a live and kicking brought to you by PHP architect and made better by our partners at PHP School more about them later this is the podcast explores the latest developments in PHP and what it’s like to earn a living in PHP today, I’m 1 of your hosts Mike Paige and I’m a developer at PHP architect and my co-host is a longtime contributor to our magazine, and a fellow team member Chris Miller. Hey Mike how you doing I cannot say contributor today it’s normally developer so we’re making I know I know we making progress today we are live so please jump into our Discord Channel if you have any questions for ourselves or our guests today we’d love to see people interacting in there it’s not just for the the live stream you can hang out all week there are all sorts of people in there there’s core developers PHP in there there’s package maintainers. And, well whatever you can think of any type of developer you can think of they’re they’re in there so please do come and come and join us over there if you’re watching this over on our YouTube Channel please do like and subscribe
[05:38] yeah that word if you’re not listening to this in YouTube do head over to our YouTube channel and check us out there that is youtube.com. Uh we as I mentioned we also publish a magazine a monthly magazine dedicated to PHP and all things related to web development and we have a discount code for our lovely listeners a live 3 will give you the first 3 months of a digital subscription, free. We also run an annual conference called PHP Tech that is going to be in May of next year over in Chicago. The call for papers is now officially closed and we are now going through the Sorting of those talks however it was announced on Thursday on the main podcast that we’re going to run another conference alongside PHP Tech called jste. So the a call for papers is now open for for JS Tech anything to do with uh JavaScript Chris is obviously struggling to get the the link up on the screen there can’t find it so please
[06:54] submit your talks that’ll be great to see people people over there we Sorry completely hot off the press so I don’t think you even know yet Mike. The JS Tech websites up no that’s what I saw just as we were going live yes John has just announced if you’re in our Discord you’ll see that the the website for that conference is now it’s a separate conference or is it just another track we we I think I think Eric and John are saying it’s a separate conference that they’re saying a separate conference at the same conference venue yes. Alongside PHP yeah so what’s going to happen with pitch P developers and JS developers mixing. Probably the same thing that happens daily anyway moving on swag store we have a swag store where you can get yourself some T-shirts and mugs caps cups. All sorts of things are in there I do take a a look at what we’ve got going on in there and I think that is all the all the things ticked.
[07:55] I think it’s over to you Chris to uh introduce the seasonings or today’s I should say is not evening for everyone but today’s guest. So today we have Bert dwer he is a YouTuber entrepreneur Sportsman. He does talks but is there anything you don’t do. I don’t do drugs but good answer well yeah well good evening guys it’s evening for me as well so happy to join. So but you’re re streaming to our channels which is, but to your channels rather which is absolutely brilliant so yeah you you have your own YouTube channel and if I could find the right button we can even share that so that has its own.
[08:49] Bertie spelled with a u there because people can’t say your name correctly so how should it be said. Well it’s normally in in in Flemish it’s bet but yeah everyone calls me Bert or or something like that then they completely butcher my name so I used and you instead of an e in my name for my public appearance so to make it easy for everyone cool, so if you’ve been watching any of these you’ll know what our first question is because we ask everybody the same question yes yeah well well your first question would be how did I get in in touch with PHP and how sorry we lost Chris’s audio over there for a second so yes so yeah how how did you get into PHP. I wasn’t always a developer I was I graduated as an electrician and out of the blue I I entered a heist in um in University to to check out. What’s going on what can I do Beyond electricity and they were teaching flash back in the day and I was triggered by animations and stuff like that and said like you know I want to try this and it was during that University College thing that I.
[09:58] Got in touch with PHP for the first time and it made sense to me from the from the get-go so and that’s how I got into PHP in University and when I graduated from there I well I started using it to make my own business so. That’s how it happened awesome can you now hear me. Yep we can hear good Mike decided it was going to turn itself off just as I asked the question so so did did you, start your own business straight out of college well I I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs so I didn’t work for anyone I just started out with my own company I was already doing electrician stuff like installing soral modules and home electricity stuff industrial a little bit and, I got asked a question hey can you can you code a website for me and, I did that as a first client I got a second client and that’s how I started out as developer basically and quit it I eventually quit the electricity stuff. And became a full-time developer and now I actually combine that again with electricity to create stuff that communicates with uh charging devices solar modules batteries and stuff like that.
[11:18] So yeah the the circle is full for me awesome. That’s quite a unique story to just literally go hey I’m going to start a business there’s there’s not many people that will choose to do that but I guess coming from a family that that sort of guided you down that path naturally that, you have people around you that were doing that so it was just natural progression for you yeah it it basically was a no-brainer it was like yeah we someone needs my services so let me just create a price for that and knock on the second door and third door and. By the end of the day you uh end up with too many projects and you need to hire someone and yeah that was by accident and that was that’s how vulpo was created back in the day, so started out small as a hobby and it basically exploded into a company. That’s awesome I mean I think that’s probably where I went wrong in the early days I. When I first started I wanted to build that mysterious portfolio that we all apparently need and um I uh I was doing things for basically nothing or as good as nothing.
[12:27] Yeah barely charging people and I got lots and lots of work and no money which is not a good combination. Yeah yeah I hear the story multiple times and even now when when people start out they they reach out saying Hey I want I want just write code I don’t need to get paid I want to learn. To be honest that’s not how the world Works everyone that works needs to be paid eventually so yeah. That’s that’s the honest truth actually. So your first clients then were people that you already knew how did you go beyond those first couple of people. Well basically they contacted us via those clients so it’s how do you say it in English from here say I I think is the correct word correct me if I’m wrong so it was completely referred by those clients I did first and then the second wave of their Network and yeah everyone has a big Network especially in the if if they have some business they have colleagues or even other suppliers that need a website or something.
[13:36] And it just grew organically from that so yeah and we started out with just regular websites I think WordPress was wasn’t Still Still that hot at in the day so it was all just tables and and stuff like that and just basic HTML oh I remember the date of building websites with tables yeah good those were the good days I’m still seeking counseling and I I don’t remember those days but we mic is not old enough to remember the Marquee tag no I’m old enough however I wasn’t in the industry long enough it’s fair yes I’m certainly old enough to know no I I didn’t Venture into development until around sort of 2019 2020, it was for me and I got my first full-time role at the end of. 2020 so I’m I’m still quite a baby compared to to you guys when it comes to Development I’ve only got a couple of decades on you. Yeah that’s that’s quite a lot so but 1 of the reasons that we brought you on I don’t know if you remember but about 4 weeks ago Dan Nunes he posts regularly the uh PHP top 10 you got a gold
[14:56] first place on that which we are Desperately Seeking to get yeah you got the gold on that to weekly top 10 for building a real-time game in PHP, correct the heck possessed you to build a real-time game in PHP well to be honest I I created that like, a year or 3 ago but completely in JavaScript just because 1 of the tiles of the game was missing for some reason and my kid was like crying all day because it was a Sunday so no store was open so I just recreated that in JavaScript and it was before the vype coding era so it was just. Completely by hand and he ended up playing on the iPad the rest of the day and we survived the weekend because of that. So and. A few weeks ago he he said to me hey you remember that game you built for me and and and on the iPad I want to play that again but I want to play that against you. Instead of switching around the iPad he wanted me to play on my laptop and he on his iPad and I was like
[16:03] how how how do I go about with that and so and I am a big fan of laravel that’s no that’s a yeah a public secret that I’m a big fan of laravel, but I’m also a big fan of uh websockets and especially Reverb is 1 of my favorite, things out there at the moment I’ve been working with websockets for many years in the in the charging station industry. So I yeah just try to combine those 2 and basically rewrote that application in Livewire and then put, or Reverb on top of that and it for some reason it worked so we’re now playing from time to time me on my laptop and here in in in the in the couch on his iPad and to be honest the kid beats me so um so it it works and and I’m I created a video about that and well Dan picked that up it’s not the first time that Dan picks something up that I post but it was the first gold I think. Yeah I’m I’m really grateful because. Him putting out those top tents really helps like for the reach of everyone that has been introduced into his lists so it’s kind of awesome that he does that every week so.
[17:21] Absolutely and I don’t I don’t think he actually realizes quite how much influence that post has. From different conversations I’ve had with him for for your benefit but Dan actually was my employer previously okay so I’ve known Dan for years. And uh. Tweeting that tweeting and posting these things on LinkedIn I don’t think he realizes just how much impact it has for people yeah, the same thing with when I started out with YouTube pylos who you will always who who everyone knows as the the the Godfather of the YouTube channels in PHP land landscape he retweeted 1 of my videos and that impacted in like 5 500 subscribers in 1 day it’s amazing how much impact that has and the same thing with. I’m good buddies with free if he retweets something it’s it’s the amount of reach that gets its mind-blowing yeah it’s mental isn’t it yeah. Go go. Whenever I I retweet something of other people I really hope that it has the same impact that other people has on my content so yeah yeah.
[18:34] Going back a couple of years ago I was doing a series of tweets on the history of computing and how we got from a lovely all the way through and it was picked up by I buy freak and he retweeted 1 of them. And that 1 alone got over 10,000 likes because. That’s crazy yeah yeah yeah mental when that happens yeah I think this is a good point to just hear from our partners and we’ll be right back in a few moments.
[19:09] Thank you to our partners at php.com. Every app builds up technical debt over time it’s the price we pay for shipping new features and moving fast when we build up too much of it though it can start to impact how we work team velocity suffers bugs become more frequent and take longer to. And everyone starts to get a little frustrated the key to managing debt is to measure it a credit score can help you understand how well your managing your financial debt and now there’s a credit score for your technical debt. Go to php.com to get a free technical debt score and monitoring for all of your PHP applications today. Thank you score we all sort out our timings on those 1 day we’ll get it right we’ve probably won’t I mean we’ve had we’ve had 11 episodes so far no we won’t get it right so I just I want to just go back a little bit of just what we were talking about just before we went to our partners and,
[20:11] I think it’s really important so it’s 1 of the things we’re trying to promote in within this this show about the community within within pitch p and. It shows that how important. It is to try and pull people up so if if the 1 of the creators out there that that gets crazy views or or is quite popular and people know the the it’s really nice when they do. Highlight some other people that are sort of lower down the the rung of of content creation it just helps so much and as Chris was saying I don’t think they always realize how much it does. Help, not just to create the craters with with Dan in particular pointing out some really good content out there that people can go go and learn from so yeah yeah. Yeah the same thing with I meet a lot of those guys at conferences and we’re all just humans with flesh and blood and yeah they’re so some of them are so humble as well mostly all of them of course but yeah they don’t realize how much impact they have on people’s lives like yeah,
[21:21] I was in in India last year and the impact that people have on on the guys their lives over there it’s so huge and it’s only when they express their gratitude that you feel the impact the same thing with me people just thanked me for my content back there and in Europe that never happens but there they they really Express their gratitude for being stuff out there the retweeting of stuff so yeah it’s it’s very nice to see that. Yeah and it it works both ways as well of course there’s some amazing content coming out from Indian, yeah YouTubers can I help for example stuff that he’s posting. He is awesome as well I had a chance to to meet him in in India I did a a small live stream with him as well and we we just text now from now and then he has a really nice person as well so yeah yeah. Absolutely I think that’s 1 of the important parts is a lot of most of the people in the pitch pretty well are just nice people.
[22:25] Yeah. And the idea as with any Community you do get the odd bad person but it doesn’t take long for the community to go hey that’s not on. Yeah yeah correct and that’s the I’ve been in other communities as well and the PHP community and the laravel community in particular we, help each other tremendously it’s it’s amazing to see the support that we give and receive towards each other yeah so it’s really nice other communities can ya can learn from that. Yeah absolutely. So going back to the uh game video 1 of the choices that you made was Reverb for websockets now this sort of opens up the whole concept of real-time PHP. And a lot of people. Have this opinion that PHP can’t do that what do you think packages like Reverb do for php’s reputation. Yeah but for the reputation of PHP it’s it’s really good because we now can do in the a real-time stuff with websockets we we are I have been using websockets in PHP for years.
[23:36] Communicating between server and charging stations in real time with PHP and we used ratchets for that which is a package for websockets as well but. Reverb made it so easy. For PHP developers to implement that with a server in the application itself and now we can also use echo on the front end so the the Alpine GS part and even react and Vue with on Echo and stuff like that to communicate between. Have you react an Alpine front end and a laravel back end without any technical complexity in under the hood it’s still quite complex it’s using a react PHP but, it is made so simple for all the developers out there and together with deploying that on Forge now it’s available on cloud as well it’s so easy to set it up and that is a really really a game-changer for not only laravel but PHP in general. And I think it’s it’s not just websockets it’s all of the other stuff that goes around that brings us to,
[24:48] more and more to real time you have that old concept that node is the 1 that’s reserved for fast fast Real Time Communication yeah and I think that was true. A while ago some years ago but I think now with all the concepts that we have like indeed the websockets were Reverb where we have also still stuff like polling conditional polling we have we can do microservices as well with with, we can do a lot of stuff now that. Yeah brings PHP back in the game for big applications small applications and and also the real-time stuff so yeah I I truly believe that laravel in particular with wever gave that little push that was needed to keep that momentum going and to. Put it out there to the non PHP developers like hey we we can do this we we don’t you don’t need JavaScript and node and all complexity we can do this in PHP right now. So yeah yeah. So you use live wire in the building process of this and 1 of the questions that I get asked occasionally is to describe the mental model of liveware.
[26:03] I haven’t got an answer for that when you compare it to something like react and Vue have you yeah. I’m not that huge how should I put this I’m not that good at JavaScript so whenever I can stay in my PHP landscape I really like doing that and. I know under the hood it’s also JavaScript which is yeah communicating front and back end but live wire makes it possible for me as a pure PHP developer to also create front-end applications that, have the same reactivity as my mic is like. There we go yes that really helps me to create stuff out there that is also reactive and does everything that a normal JavaScript front end would do without touching any JavaScript stuff and that’s why I love using Live Wire. So I guess the key there is it keeps you in the same language and correct yeah yeah I mean it’s quite incredible to think that. Even 5 years ago we couldn’t have done front-end back-end mobile desktop CLI.
[27:16] Basically everything all in in 1 language basically yeah yeah but to be honest at at voo we do use react we do use Vue we do use other stuff as well but for me I am in charge of all back-end related stuff or automating stuff all jobs and cues so. I do not touch any of the front ends so yeah that’s why I truly love PHP and my colleagues are using Vue and react as well so yeah it’s possible but not for me. See that that’s when people know I’m a back-end developer when they see me do front-end work yeah yeah I have to admit I try and avoid writing JavaScript as much as possible. Or or especially if I’m in a allowable app it’s Live Wire although I have just done a a recent personal project where I. Basically got AI to do all of the JavaScript oh yeah yeah I my colleagues basically when I create a project for myself my colleagues do the JavaScript part and they redo what I did basically so yeah
[28:30] I I used to do JavaScript in just vanilla JavaScript get documented by element ID and stuff like that but nowadays it’s more than that same with CSS by the way, I left CSS whenever less and sauce existed came out so whenever we started nesting stuff it was too much for me but if I if I see what we can do now with pure CSS just knot tailwind and stuff like that but pure CSS like scroll driven animation and stuff like that. Yeah it’s it’s amazing 10 years ago we we never would have been imagining what what’s possible right now so yeah. It’s quite incredible just how far development has come overall but then the the key things of the the Big 3 JavaScript CSS HTML yeah yeah yeah those have taken Leaps and Bounds and. Let’s be honest you can build a website with CSS and HTML and you don’t actually need JavaScript for building a website unless you want to send something to the back end. Yeah correct well good friend of mine bra who is a developer relations at Google we work together for years and he has basically in charge of the yeah CSS spec at the moment he is yeah not not him only but he is in the team that
[29:54] goes over all the specification. And he was on the project for scroll driven animations and and stuff like that and the Hass selector yeah what what we. Can do right now indeed we don’t need JavaScript for the normal websites we can do all the cool stuff just purely in CSS as well another friend of mine is going around the world giving presentations about CSS just making, Pokemon balls that pop open and and do stuff just pure CSS and it’s magical for me to see that, I can’t imagine doing that myself but yeah it’s amazing what they can do right now I mean let’s be honest he could draw a circle and that would impress me. That’s the level of CSS I can do yeah so going back to vulpo. Yeah with with volpo would you say that the stack that you used for your tooling your testing that kind of thing is is that. Pretty close to what you used to build the game or do you use something different. Well the stack that we use in our projects at vulpo depend on on the project but.
[31:06] Let’s say 70% is Livewire at the moment so what we do for testing its best PHP by Nuno linting we do use pints for tooling. We do use herds on our local machines and I am a big fan of Ry by spasi. Because not only because he has a good friend of mine but I really like how the application works and for uptime monitoring as well we use odier. Some say yeah you should use nightwatch or you should use Sentry or something like that for that but we can be combined that with flair also because it’s Belgian it’s from where I live so I try to support the local stuff as well, so yeah that that’s about the tooling that we use and I use phpstorm as an editor so yeah. So pretty much the the laravel stack yeah pretty much yeah yeah. Yeah well I tried other stuff as well I started off with Notepad. Went to Sublime Text and vs code and now in phpstorm so but have you tried the best editor. I’ve seen a lot of them I have a colleague which who is switching every week,
[32:20] to new editors but uh yeah but I’m I’m curious right now but I’m surprised you don’t know that the fact that I’ve asked you if he used the best editor it’s any of it. Ah yeah oh I tried but I failed it’s so hard you exit it. Yeah yeah yeah I have a sledgehammer yeah no it’s it’s truly amazing I’ve worked with a few people that are really powerful at at new Vim but. It’s not for me I I know I I need to be able to scroll sometimes and click click or the click and but yeah it’s amazing what people can do with that yeah my camera is like. Blurring sometimes I don’t know why I’m very sorry for that boys don’t worry that’s okay and so I I I use PHP storm as well by actually use Vim bindings. Oh so I still move around using the a lot of the a lot of the stuff that I do is there’s so much more I can tap into to. So I I I strive to not have to use a a mouse 1 day for everything but I’m not quite there yet so it’s a bit more tweaking to get get there.
[33:33] Yeah so I’m like kind of in between the 2 of you I mean I use near him for good couple of years. And I got on I started getting on really well with it and then it used to just sort of. Stopped working and then I stopped using it and then I tried to load it up the other day and like so many plugins that are out of date and things I’m just like I think I’m going to have to Nuke this and start again if I I’m going to actually use this but yeah I I’ve landed kind of in the middle, yeah yeah well I would love to be able to but, at this moment it would take me too much time to learn it and that’s time I don’t have unfortunately so, an interest in approach that I I kind of took because I’m the same it’s like I don’t have time to learn all these key key bindings but if you set it up in PHP storm you can just have for example just the HJ. KL navigation yeah and then the insert and so just you can start off with real basic
[34:35] bindings to start with and then start adding new ones as you go I just stopped adding new ones when I was Finding I was reaching for the mouse I just got to the point where I’m going to have to do a lot of research to work out how to do this, in without having to reach for the mouse and I just stopped doing then but uh I might take it back up again. Yeah that’s well I’m pretty happy with how my setup is right now and yeah but maybe maybe I’ll try it 1 day but I’m a big fan of like the minimalistic style. Mhm so I have everything cleared out on top right left everywhere everything is gone big line hiding big text to see what I’m doing and I, use white mode more than dark mode right now so maybe it’s my age I don’t know I don’t I’m more of a dark mode. I I pretty much see everything start made made for me yeah, I’m pretty much convinced that my monitor doesn’t know what white is but except for recording videos it looks better in dark mode so that’s
[35:43] yeah why I use dark mode some from time to time but for work it’s white mode well light mode.
[36:02] That choice is what makes it so good that you know I I love neovim and. But I’m never going to force somebody to go and use it just because I happen to like it no yeah. And I’ve also used PHP storm and still occasionally fall back to PHP storm when I don’t know how to do something in the oven yeah. No that’s not that’s right you can just yeah and that’s the cool part with not only PHP by the way and and everything in in our industry and Tech whatever works works it works for you is fine. It doesn’t matter we’re not going to force anyone to use yeah some kind of editor that someone else likes or something like that. But I do hear companies that really enforce like hey you should use only this editor. Yeah I don’t I don’t agree with that adrop I think we have we’re with 7 now so I think we have 4 different editors so yeah. If the linting is the Same by the end of the day and the GitHub repositories I’m I’m happy doesn’t matter how they create it if it’s all perfectly limited in our GitHub workflows it’s fine for me
[37:16] and you know that that variety and choice means that you’re also opening up. A whole world of people that you wouldn’t otherwise attract you know correct if you, if you’re advertising a job and say we only use PHP store more we only use neovim you go into alienate the other group of people that don’t well they do need to use PHP but yeah yeah I mean PHP yes but PHP storm maybe not so much no I think I think we’ve we’ve. Teammates I think we’ve got for a variety of different edges that you use like I know that we’ve got Neo with me and Eric I know that we’ve got PHP storm with a couple of the others yeah I’m sure I’ve seen a couple of people using vs code, I know half want to say that 1 of our colleagues uses Sublime Text. I’ve got a funny feeling I was going to say Sublime if if any of our colleagues are watching live chat let us know what you what you’re using. So moving on where are we up to with our with our questions I’m just scanning them now.
[38:23] So you’ve gone out of order again so I get lost were there any 1 out of order that’s enough for me to get confused. So we’ve reprogrammed these questions and then I change it on the Fly and completely confused Mike just to see how quick it happens so the the 1 that we’re missing Mike is number 8 yes that’s what I was thinking I was thinking you haven’t asked that question yet. So Joe uses PHP storm. Okay that’s the 1 I thought used Sublime so I was wrong to be honest I thought he used to blame as well we got that wrong okay so none of us use Sublime then maybe it’s all. I’m expecting John to say he uses Sublime now did my fair part with Sublime I think I use it for 3. Uh I I’ve never tried sublime or will it will admit I’ve not tried Sublime before so I don’t know I don’t know what that’s like I. I did run a very first started learning I was using notepad plus plus. Because that’s what the book told me to use that I picked up yeah to learn how to to write a web page.
[39:35] And then.
[39:47] I I I went into this code. Then from vs code I went to Neo Vim I actually followed Jess Archer’s course on laracast how to set up the event for PHP absolutely amazing, and that’s what I have to go and redo at some point to understand how all that works I can’t remember now and then yeah it was probably. Probably about 3 years ago I moved over to a pitch piston. Okay yeah I I remember I start that lower cost thing of Jess but I never finished it I should do it again, in 99% of it still works exactly like she says in that um there’s the odd 1 or 2 bits that don’t work. That way anymore but the key bindings are all there and all valid yeah it’s it’s little tiny things I’ll have to Chris you’re gonna have to help me fix my because that’s what that is basically that setup there’s a few little tweaks I made that were more personal to myself that I thought would work better for me but yeah I jumped into it.
[40:50] About a week ago try to edit some of my DOT file stuff and it just. Broke and didn’t work at all and I tried to fix it and yeah I got nowhere I got so confused so uh yeah so we we have an actual PhD telling us that Sublime was used until 2 or 3 years ago so. And we’re literally seeing it even in the people listening and watching that we’ve got editors out there of different types, yeah I’m curious what are there any people in the chat suggesting something we didn’t touch uh not yet no not yet. So twice we haven’t had a vs code thrown in there yet. So yeah we just got Pitch p storm and Sublime at the moment people are saying Okay um. But none of these are wrong as we said it’s what works for you it’s definitely what works for you. So we’re going to go back to question 8 are you going to ask question 8 Chris would you like to ask about database normalization you you go for that 1 okay so. In your game that you built you chose to use Json rather than normalized databases now I’m old school and Will shout at people for not normalizing databases but they also get Json so what was the choice for
[42:09] going down that route rather than normalized well it wasn’t actually a choice I just ran my Json object into. Um mySQL database that was basically it and sometimes in in client projects we do that as well. But we extract the data that we need of that well let me rephrase that sometimes in client projects we do store Json as well in our database because that is mainly coming from sensors or raspberry pies or whatever and that’s a huge chunk of data that we need to store so we store that into a Json object and we have the key values that we need, extracted out of that into another database column basically and that’s where the stored with Colo I can do that, I can see a thousand times a stored value and then we can actually extract that from a Json object into the separate value not sure about the name but we I have multiple examples of that so no there there wasn’t actually. A particular reason why just because I use it from time to time I could have done it with a flat yeah.
[43:22] Table as well like saying hey position X or position 6 or 7 is this card and have separate rows for that in the database but yeah well I stored it into a Json object in my game basically yeah. If it would ever go to production I could reconsider that as well yeah and again it’s it’s 1 of those things where, at this point in time it is literally a choice you yeah you can draw objects out of Json in database just as easily as you can of single single field nowadays yeah. Well back in the day we couldn’t so I think it was MySQL know it was MySQL 8 no. Yeah 8 that allowed Json objects. That was for me as especially for me as a game changer in data storing because we needed to to store a huge amount of data coming from devices. Like meter values for example or diagnostic stuff coming from Hardware devices that is a huge chunk chunk of Json that is coming in and if we need to extract that and put that into separate values instead of storing just the 1 object and pushing it away,
[44:40] yeah that was a game changer for us because we had thousands of those devices connected and they were all sending out stuff every minute so yeah we needed some way to store that and deal with it later so and that’s how I got into pushing Json objects in databases and doing something with them when we have time for it or whenever we need it yeah. That’s a very busy database if you got. Once a minute from multiple systems so yeah and it all works on MySQL so yeah we have considered other stuff as well but for now it works and then we have. A lot of devices connected to that and well yeah it works yeah. It’s quite incredible to just think that MySQL. The oldest database system around basically is still able to handle that volume of data with. Breaking a sweat and also thanks to how eloquent does the the masses signing stuff um yeah that that helps yeah. Yeah. Eloquent is no RM does so much to help you yeah yeah it does but it’s it’s also Keen to understand what it does under the under the hood I’ve seen developers do stuff with eloquent that I think like you.
[46:08] This you could do this differently because they don’t know what the impact is under the hood but yeah that’s yeah that’s the, when I graduated we used JavaScript now they graduate the they use react and they don’t know what reactors under the hood so small things that they do have a huge impact on the the, nature of the language and I think it’s still very important to know that and whether it’s JavaScript or PHP or or whatever the base of the language is so important and to understand what is happening under the hood especially if you’re talking about scale yeah. That’s so important and scaling something isn’t just about. Size of data it’s also the the number of requests that the number of times you read and. I’ve dealt with apps where the database has been the biggest bottleneck because it’s not been not been designed for the scale. Ability that it needed yeah yeah I’m a huge fan of. Storing like for instance if you you if you would do a statistics page and instead of calculating the amount of sales I’m just thinking out loud right now.
[47:29] Calculating the amount of sales and amount of objects that are purchased in the past 30 days. I like to generate that once stored in the database every hour for instance. Or every 10 minutes instead and then we have 1 record that needs to be pulled out instead of 1,000 records and calculated so that’s a small trade-off of doing. A crown job or something like that or scheduled task which is generating a statistic value and storing that in a database so and we can cache that as well instead of, yeah needing to recalculate stuff over and over and that is also something that we, yeah we try to do for all our clients and I can see Juniors coming in and not understanding why we do that until yeah if I can say like like this when shit hits the fan and requests come pouring in really fast and then you see the benefit of that. Yeah so going back about. 4 years ago I was teaching a boot camp here in the UK with a company and 1 of the things that I showed him 1 of the lessons was what happens if you do overload a database.
[48:46] So I created a database and then I created a script that just did a million requests to the database it was on a tiny little VPN deliberately to fail at a million. And it was like oh but that’s terrible. What are we going to do these were literally people that had never coded up until starting the boot camp yeah so I just showed them the idea of right so the problem is we’ve got a lot of requests coming in for 1 piece of data how about we put that in memory, and I showed them caching and then so what we’ve got over here we’ve got, a really bad request that’s coming in and it’s drawing from that table and that table and that table so let’s start by optimizing that query a bit. Or we could just save it as a value yeah and show them some of the key optimization techniques yeah. The others so so many good things out there right now that we can do like caching I really like the did you guys ever hear of varnish.
[49:45] Vaguely rings a bell yeah well thing is like a caching mechanism which allows yeah. Allows caching to do on very very big scale a friend of mine works for varnish software right now and he explains it so good how it works under the hood. And if I need to teach Juniors coming in or explain how caching works I just start showing 1 of his videos and they’re hooked right away and it, yeah a release went stale and stuff like that and how the flagging in caching works and we can all tweak that in varnish so I would love to see a good implementation of Varnish in laravel I didn’t have any case of that yet, maybe we should do 1 if we have some time but yeah. 1 of our colleagues is actually used varnish on big projects yeah he is it’s very good yeah. I might have to have a proper look at it it’s literally 1 of those things where I think I’ve heard of it but never had a need to use.
[50:54] So we we have 1 more pre-programmed question okay and this 1 could take about an hour to answer. Oh the the game that you built it is basically real-time collaborative application but just hiding in disguise. Um what’s the most unexpected thing you’ve built with that the most unexpected thing, well as I mentioned before we have this thing with charging stations for electric vehicles where we have real-time monitoring of those basically that is also a websockets so there’s also real time so whenever someone plugs in their charging cable we can see that popping on the dashboard if their transaction is accepted or if there is an error we have a dashboarding tool that yeah reports something is wrong we need to send a technician over there or even when a client of ours is charging with his charging RFID Card in Scandinavia or in Portugal or whatever we can see that instantly and that is also just websockets and PHP,
[52:03] and that’s it so I think in that case of real time web at the moment. That would be the most unexpected thing that we have built so far because no 1. Yeah we think of PHP for that kind of scale of application in real time. Yeah so I think that covers part of the question I guess yeah but believe it or not I probably wouldn’t even have considered PHP to answer that question. We we need to do this multinational real-time data feed and we need it to be showing on dashboards. Your first thought isn’t PHP for that which know for at first we we yeah of course JavaScript with node and stuff like that but at the time when you were thinking tinkering around with a websocket for a Raspberry Pi which was monitoring I think it was raspberries, that we were growing with a camera and stuff like that and I needed to have a way to see that on a dashboard if if something, is watered or needs water or how full is a tank of the the water supply and I did that at the time with a normal websocket.
[53:21] Thing with a PHP back end and that allowed me to think out of the box and say well these these charging stations why why not let’s try it. And we tried that and together with bra who is now devil at Google we yeah we basically locked ourselves in a room for 3 days and and I had at it and. Out came the products very very first prototype of what we are still using today interestingly I think my first thought for an application like that would have been go. Oh yeah I don’t go I never I never tried basically I never tried go yeah. It it’s a very interesting language for PHP devs because you can, you can see how go has been influenced by PHP and how PHP has been influenced by go and, you end up with some silver merites that you wouldn’t expect and then you end up with some complete differences, like you want to do a Json oh no you can’t do that you have to have structs first yeah and you have to tell it what the Json is going to look like have you seen apis,
[54:31] yeah I’ve seen a lot of different types of apis as well no but I I think now that I think of it we, looked at Ruby on Rails as well to do the thing that we needed to do. But we ended up with PHP anyhow so yeah. But that just proves that it’s able to do what even Ruby can. Yeah Ruby is 1 of those languages that honestly people underestimate as much as they do PHP yeah yeah it’s. Well I I did didn’t do any production applications in Ruby on Rails but I think it’s around with it for like 3 years creating my own projects and trying stuff. And I really enjoyed writing that as well, people are telling me hey you should look at rust as well right now it would be something for you but it’s on my to-do list so I’m very eager to try that as well but yeah for now PHP just works for me. Yeah and it’s it’s great to be able to go and look at other languages and see what’s there. But you often fall back to that first love that 1 that really made the difference yeah and trying out other stuff like
[55:51] opens up the possibility to learn other methods as well I I picked up a few things when I was trying Ruby on Rails which I then implemented in my workflow for setting up my my classes so. Yeah I whatever I try to do I take away some some pointers that I can use in PHP so yeah. I’m still looking for the excuse to find a pointer in Assembly Language that I can use in PHP I write Assembly Language for fun, I think assembly was back when I was doing University and then I never touched that again so it would advise what most people do with a certainly but yeah. Yeah I I find it fun because I love the idea of literally knowing exactly where each bit is in memory, yeah the problem with that is I know exactly where each bit is in memory. And the program is about 55 million lines before it can print hello on screen adding 1 single line can. You can mess up the whole thing yeah assembly right so yeah it’s who I I would need to look,
[57:06] to the syntax again but it’s it’s almost 16 years ago I guess or or even more yeah. Anyway I’m old this weekend for me but,
[57:30] questions I’d like to to ask you these questions we asked most of our guests the first 1 is what is happening in the PHP world today, or has happened that really excites you and really drives you to continue to use PHP prism. By TG that’s I’ve been tinkering around with AI pretty much. Daily right now and the stuff that we also at vo we be billed for clients right now we get a lot of questions about AI so. For example my personal Strava helper I also tweeted about that I guess whenever I do a workout. It gets pulled in by the Strava API nothing fancy about that and then I use prism to shoot that out to open Ai and also to Cloud to see hey this is the workout that Bert did. Your coach by the way and your specialized in try athletes and blah blah blah blah and doing proper analysis and create the next workout that he should do and if I don’t follow the workout that he did proposed to me he is actually yeah complaining to me saying hey you didn’t do what I asked you to do so yeah I prism allows me to,
[58:48] yeah. To create cool stuff with AI as well instead of using stuff like any 10 or something like that with a regular API call I can now do that in my PHP projects as well. Well in my laravel projects and that is something that will be in my opinion changed the game for the coming 3 years. Mhm yeah well TJ’s like a friend friend of Architects and he will be on this show with us on the 25th of November. Okay cool that we’re really looking forward to having that conversation and so it’s certainly something that. Excites both of both me and Chris is the the ability to bring AI into our into our applications and I I’ve got some plans of things that I want I’m I’m building up to to using so I’ve got some ideas to use prism, so I’m I’m a really looking forward to getting to the point where I start using it I’ve just got a few more foundations to lay in that out before I get to pull that in to be completely honest I was skeptical about AI like for a long time oh I was yeah yeah
[59:55] I even did not use co-pilot and autocomplete stuff like that I didn’t use that until. Lacan EU last year where Diana of Beyond code convinced me to to try it. And well that unlocked a whole stuff the whole thing for me the other completion stuff I I couldn’t survive anymore without it at the moment so. But I do hope that AI doesn’t kill our own brains I see a lot of vipe coding stuff going wrong and and and yeah it. It would be a shame to see that all the stuff that AI is building for us goes to production without overseeing it, I see a lot of stuff going on especially with Junior developers they they yeah they basically just prompt uh right now and they don’t know and the other day someone asked me hey can you look at this here I have some issue and I asked him how did you come about this idea and he literally said I don’t know yeah I did that. Yeah we had a very long and interesting conversation to do with AI it comes up on almost every show but we had our episode
[01:01:14] 4 I’m just looking at episode 4 we had uh Ash Ashley hyndell from Larry yeah we were we we were told we obviously bought him on to talk about boost but we did a lot of talking about Ai and and our views on how to use it effectively in our work is it really taking over, like developers job it certainly seems to be creating jobs in the industry for V Co code of fixes whatever so we’ve actually evolved now from Vibe code fixes we now have 3 different people that are working around Vibe coding, we have Vibe coders who are professional Vibe coders now we have I know where you’re going now we have professional Vibe code fixes. And then we have people who run webinars about how to be a professional Vibe code awesome it’s uh yeah, yeah yeah a bit afraid of how the industry will evolve basically around all the AI stuff but. Yeah if we stay true to our yeah to to the stuff that we build and the passion that we have for it and to be honest I also use it to say hey I have this and this and this create thread controller for me and then it must do this and this and this it creates that and then I go.
[01:02:37] Check what he did and and correct that in my kind of way that I want it so yeah. Sometimes he is riding an awful awful stuff so before we uh started talking we asked the question are we going to see the comments on your channels answer yes we are. Oh cool yeah that’s come out from your YouTube channel is it now yes yeah we can see that cool. Okay cool cool cool so that works for anyone that doesn’t realize what’s what we’re talking about now we we’re experimenting we’ve never done this before. Bert has paired and he is streaming this to all his channels, as well so it’s going to all our channels so we’re doing this for the first time it’s pretty cool so yeah that’s a common come from your YouTube channel there all right, cool yeah and I tend to agree refresh your skills and do it with out AI yeah yeah yeah so. I’m trying to get my yeah at VPO my my team on board with no AI days so. That we don’t touch any AI stuff during a certain day but it didn’t happen until now Sally.
[01:03:53] I’ve sort of evolved the way that I’m using Ai and I’ve gone through companies where it’s been enforced that they shout right 70% of thy code with AI and I’ve been in companies where it’s Thou shalt not write anything with AI, now I’ve landed here where AI isn’t isn’t a bad thing. But he’s also not the be all and end all and I’ve sort of evolved the the way that I’m using it is I’ve got open code running. I’ve got a llama in the background running Kimmy on 1 trillion and. By using those Kimmy has the knowledge of my codebase to answer questions about the code but I don’t let it code for me. Yeah yeah yeah and a 1 trillion model is scary. Yeah yeah I can imagine yeah honestly I actually think Kimmy might be marginally better than clawed at code. Which is yeah I’m I’m using Claude right now and I’m to be honest I’m really impressed how how how good it is that’s. If you prompted specifically to do just 1 single task.
[01:05:08] If you ask it to create well if if you give them a 2 big task it will fail tremendously but if you can like hey I have this service Clause over here I want to. Do body yada yada with with it and make sure you use as a reference another repository where I created the same thing. In that case he is quite good at what he does.
[01:05:35] And Claude is genuinely brilliant understanding code presenting code yeah and I think the 1 thing that. Gives Kimmy The Edge is the context window so it’s got a context window that about 20% bigger than Klaus. So it can hold in memory more than. No combine that with laravel Boost and you end up with a ridiculously powerful AI. And it will answer questions in ways that I will say you know what will happen if I add this and it will tell me about a side effect 15 glasses deep and it’s like that’s incredible. It understands it well enough to know that these are all linked through this pathway and it’s going to break over here yeah yeah yeah well I. Don’t tell this to Emily but I didn’t use boost until now and I’m planning to use it like next week. On a project that I the hobby project to just yeah get my my feet wet in it because I’m I’m filed up into work. All over the place right now so I didn’t have any time for that so but I’m really really eager to to learn how everything works with that as well so yeah if you have any pointers.
[01:06:59] Do send me an email it’s easy it is so easy just to install it and then just away you go, I’m I’m using I’m using your own personal projects at the moment so I’ve got it on 2 project I’m using Claude. With alongside it and it is just so so easy I mean Claude isn’t perfect I I will I’ll get it it’s like as I saw there was 1 Project I did I put in the feature and I knew I knew it was going to be mainly JavaScript because I was pulling in the drops JavaScript library to handle a lot of logic and. I thought that’s not something I could it would take me months to write this so I I thought I’ll give Claude to go and see see how how well it does and it doesn’t work first time. Um there are times when I was just getting frustrated with it it’s like like you’re telling me you fixed it but you haven’t it’s still doing the same thing so it takes it so it doesn’t get it right first time I had no idea what sort of quality of code it is so I will get someone to look it over before I ever actually put it anywhere,
[01:08:06] public just to check that it’s not nothing crazy yeah yeah I did the same thing by the way yeah yeah with my very first package I had freak look it over and after 1 hour he had like 20 commits so yeah, having someone looking over the things that you did is also very nice yeah and somebody that. Can be for want of a better word harsh but you know that it’s for the benefit of the end result, and some of the best code reviews I’ve ever had have been like this is terrible here’s how to fix it. Mhm yeah and what 1 guy that I worked with Alex had jumped 24 some of the code reviews he gave me were like. 20 30 40 comments on the code of make sure that we’re doing this do this do this do this and it’s like. At this point would it not have been quicker for you to write it and the answer is yes but now I know how to write it that sounds familiar. I don’t know what you could possibly mean Mike you asked for the review
[01:09:15] anyway we are now running starting to run long so I don’t want to keep you too too long but so I just want to say thank you very much for giving up your time. To track it’s been yeah it’s been fascinating fascinating chat.
[01:09:39] There we go so anyone that’s not in our Discord Channel please do pop over into our Discord Channel there are people great people great Developers and all sorts hanging out in there all week long we can have the questions asked just General conversations so yeah do jump over there that would be great if you’re on a YouTube channel please like And subscribe if you’re not you can pop over to our YouTube channel and. Subscribe to the channel you’ll get you can get notifications we’ve gone our Channel we’ve got 3 different shows we’ve got us we’ve got the main uh show with Eric and John on the Thursday and there’s also Community corner with Scott. Where my YouTube magazine we, produce a monthly magazine and we have a discount code there for you on the screen a live 3 and that will give you the first 3 months of a year subscription for free so yeah and that’s a digital subscription so I forgot to say that earlier you know
[01:10:37] it’s a digital know you said it earlier did I okay I I tend to forget to tell people it’s a digital 1 I get told off so that’s this digital subscription it’s a pitch pritet. All sorts of Articles to do with pitch Pete and and surrounding Tech that we use within our industry some great stuff in there and Chris is 1 of our main contributors there if you want to write for the magazine. Get in touch. We do pay for people to write to articles so please do get in touch and I’ll tell you what would be really interesting article is that how you going to build this this game might be quite an interesting 1 to write a realtime game in laravel would be a brilliant feature article for well I I was actually planning to write that for my blog so maybe I would uh write it for yours, that would be wonderful yeah if you write it for our magazine we’ll pay you for it. With with awesome I yes we do yeah we pay for pay for the articles I I can’t remember how much it is in or whether it’s publicly known it’s $75 for 2,500 words or more.
[01:11:47] Okay that’s a triple of what I make on YouTube. Okay we get it down get it sent over to Eric or John or to or reach out to 1 of us and we’ll get you into in contact with the right people. Moving on Tech pitch pitch 2026 I had to think of the year then is is happening get your tickets it would be lovely to see people over there it’s 1 of the the nicest. Tech conferences PHP conferences I’ve ever attended myself I know I’m a bit biased but, I I’ve found it’s it’s 1 of those environments where there are no clicks and I mean you’ll sit down in certain chatting to someone and the next thing you know it’s it’s been Randy you’re chatting to or or Sarah from internals and you’re just chatting away and you’re like. Well well you go and go for sushi with TJ and Daniel wrote reverse that wrote 10 verbs yeah yep so do do join us get get some tickets and join us alongside that there is now a JS Tech which you can now submit talks to I don’t how long,
[01:12:55] Chris you know how long that’s open for Winter’s that close so at the moment it’s open for a month from the episode of the podcast so. Ever so slightly less than a month yes so is that just the end of November I believe so yeah. Okay so I think we think it’s in there’s no if you go to session I calm. Dash dash 2026 and it will have the closing date on. Head over to our swag store as well and check out the merch you can get some great t-shirts and mugs and so on and everything all those sorts of things that is everything from us once again but thank you very much for giving us your time today there is Bert’s YouTube channels do head over subscribe to him he’s putting out some really cool content yeah thanks that’s that’s absolutely no problem at all right everyone oh hang on I’ve got a queue this up because I’ve not got the right screen open. Where is it where is it there it is right thank you very much everyone and we’ll see you next time bye.
| Air date | November 5, 2025 |
|---|---|
| Hosted by | Chris Miller, Mike Page |
| Guest(s) | Bert De Swaef |
