As I wrote last month, streams are an important feature of PHP used quite a bit without most developers ever noticing. While developers can use them to help optimize read and write operations, they are also useful for working with incoming requests and data manipulation.

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.

Listen to Eric, John, and Oscar discuss the articles in the January 2021 issue, Newfangled Views. Topics Covered Front-end coding with Vue and React. Responsibilities when you’re a development lead Security of third-party resources Learning new skills and avoiding burnout. Mimicking AWS S3 with Minio  

Eric and John talk to long-time contributor Chris Tankersley about contributing to the magazine and more. Topics Covered Getting started in programming and web development with PHP. Docker and using it across operating systems. Developing with PHP and the ecosystem around it. What kind of things he tries to cover in Education Station for self-taught […]

While completing the Deep Analysis we discussed last month, I was faced with the inability to test. That’s because—I discovered–accounting data cannot be erased—even in the sandbox. There’s no way to begin each test with a clean test environment. This month we walk through a relatively convoluted solution. We’ll capture the accounting data as we […]

This month, we’re diving into running our own S3 compatible open-source server via the open-source project MinIO. We’ll configure MinIO alongside our local development environment to quickly replicate our application’s integration with S3 object storage without operating on “production” storage buckets or having to set up “dev” buckets.

Even with today’s larger servers and more abundant resources, web applications still need to be mindful of what resources they are using. While the days of worrying about every bit of memory have gone, many applications still work with data sets in the tens or hundreds of megabytes in size. We may not think about […]

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 […]

Listen to Eric, John, and Oscar discuss the articles in the December 2020 issue, PHP 8 Bits and Git Topics Covered OSMI 2020 Mental Health in Tech Survey. Features in PHP 8 we’re looking forward to using, like constructor property promotion and named arguments. Being more productive with Git, aliases, and hooks. Using the circuit […]

By Matthew Turland PHP 8 is a significant release for much more than just its version number: it’s absolutely packed with shiny new language features, potential performance improvements, and fixes to many unintuitive behaviors and inconsistencies in previous iterations of the language. This article won’t provide a comprehensive review of every new addition or change […]