When facing a challenging problem, you want a flexible codebase that adapts quickly. Object-oriented programming facilitates it by giving you the power through inheritance, encapsulating code in reusable objects, and generally making them work for your application as you see fit. However, we can find flexibility in other programming approaches.

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 […]

While much of the world shuts down, the PHP core developers have been hard at work preparing for the release of PHP 8.0 at the end of this year! The feature freeze is in just a few months (July 28th), so this is the exciting time when there is a push to get various features […]

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 […]

This month, we chat with Sherri Wheeler about the Business of PHP and other topics from the April 2020 magazine. Topics Getting started using machine learning with PHP. API design and how the OpenAPI can automate and improve your architecture. Writing command line scripts with Symfony’s Console components. PHP communities that don’t realize it and […]

Writing console commands with PHP is something I have always taken for granted. I started my career having learned Linux and command line server configuration and was very comfortable writing small applications with BASH scripts, Python, and even dabbling in C and Microsoft Qbasic. These commands copied files to a backup location, process batched data […]

When you’re dealing with data, sooner or later, someone is likely to ask about machine learning. Start researching machine learning, and you’d be forgiven for thinking you need to use Python or R, TensorFlow, or PyTorch. This doesn’t have to be the case! With PHP and some basic knowledge, we can start to experiment and […]

In Episode 30 In this episode, we dive into How Magento is Evolving and chat with Magento evangelist Ben Marks. Topics The free magazine issue courtesy of Adobe and Magento. An interview with Ben Marks on how Magento went from an open-source project to its acquisition, the value of the community and ecosystem, how Magento […]

Virtualmin is a web hosting and cloud computing control panel. A hosting control panel is a web-based application that runs on a server and manages all the aspects of a hosting account. This includes account information, websites, web servers, databases, mail servers, and all the other services which ultimately work together to allow you to […]

Arrays are a core feature of the PHP language, and so easy to use many developers don’t go beyond them. Fixating on arrays as the uber-data structure, while tempting, can rapidly lead to unmaintainable, unreadable code. Let’s look at better options and just how accessible those options are.