Blog Profile / Planet PHP

Making use of PHP mysqlnd statistics - Johannes Schlüter

One of the great things of mysqlnd as a base library for PHP's MySQL support are the collected statistics. mysqlnd collects about 160 different statistical values about all the things going on. When having such an amount of raw data it, obviously, is quite hard to draw conclusions out of it. Show More Summary

Where do you find time to fix bad code? - Brandon Savage

Bad code. You’re stuck with it. Lots of it. Over time, one small hack has led to many. Before you know it the technical debt in your application is stacked to the ceiling. It’s hard to make heads or tails out of things. How can you fix it? What can you do? Over the past [...]

Mockery 0.8.0 Has Been Unleashed! - Pádraic Brady

I’m very happy to announce the release of Mockery 0.8.0. Mockery is a simple yet flexible PHP mock object framework for use in unit testing with PHPUnit, PHPSpec or any other testing framework. Its core goal is to offer a test double...Show More Summary

On scaling up teams - John Mertic

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on teams lately, coming up with pretty common trends, such as the importance of good team dynamics, namely people are a huge reason why a team is productive or not. Or in other words, throwing a bunch...Show More Summary

Failure Is Always An Option - Programming With Anthony - Anthony Ferrara

A few days ago, I posted a video about how to become a better developer. There were a few interesting comments made, but one in particular from the Reddit thread ( http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/... ) peaked my interest. So I decided to do a reply. Check it out: Read more »

Meetup API Client v1.0.0 - Rafael Dohms

I love APIs, but I honestly hate having to deal with signing, auth, and curl inside my controllers or services, which means I end up wrapping all of that into something that provides easy access in my controllers. I also love Meetup.com...Show More Summary

What are your most challenging object oriented progrmming questions? - Brandon Savage

You’ve been learning object oriented programming. But there are certain things you don’t grasp. No matter what, you have questions that you can’t answer. Wouldn’t it be great if you could ask someone directly? You’re in luck! The Object Oriented Programming Office Hours On Saturday, April 6th from 1 pm to 2 pm Eastern I’ll [...]

On empty return values - Larry Garfield

Earlier today, I posted a brief tweet (isn't that redundant?) about return values in PHP (or really, any language). Originally it was about return values from functions (such an exciting topic, I know), but it ended up generating a fair bit of lively conversation, as well as a patch against Drupal 8. Show More Summary

PHP 5.5 beta2 released - PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

The PHP development team announces the release of the second beta of PHP 5.5.0. This release fixes some bugs from beta one that could prevent the release from compiling. THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT PREVIEW - DO NOT USE IT IN PRODUCTION! PHP 5.5.0beta2 is shipped with some bug fixes. Show More Summary

Video Course on Learnable: OOP PHP - Lorna Mitchell

I'm delighted to announce that my new video course on Object-Oriented PHP is now available on Learnable! It's very much an introduction, aiming to cover WHY objects are so cool as well as how to declare and use one. The course is a mix...Show More Summary

Are You Leaving Money On The Table? - Brandon Savage

I know most developers like you love to learn new things. They thrive on conquering new challenges and learning new techniques. Many people learn new languages just for the challenge. After all, why would anyone ever write a Brainfuck interpreter in the first place? Many of us receive our training through our employers. We expect [...]

Good design is no excuse for wasting time - Lukas Smith

Symfony 1.x I would put into a category of frameworks focused on RAD, aka rapid application development. There are many other frameworks I would put into this category like CakePHP, Yii, CodeIgniter. All of these frameworks have their roots in the pre 5.3 days of PHP. Show More Summary

Let’s Just Build A Generic System! - Paul M. Jones

Common technical conversation: “Well, why don’t we just make a generic system, and then we’ll tweak it to work with every specific implementation as we roll it out?” There follows a long conversation from any good project manager that runs … Continue reading ?

For the very first time: Hello UK! - Liip

I have been on the conference tour for quite some time now and on top of that I travel about every 2nd weekend to some frisbee tournament around the globe. Yet I have never visited the UK. So far the most I have seen of the UK was transiting via direct bus from one London airport to another. Show More Summary

Where have all the core devs gone? - Lukas Smith

Symfony2 is without a doubt a very lively open source project. No small part thanks to Github, there is a flurry of tickets and more importantly pull requests coming in daily with dozens merged every week. These changes cover everything from small typos, to bigger refactorings, new test cases, documentation, performance optimizations. Show More Summary

Becoming A Better Developer - Programming With Anthony - Anthony Ferrara

In today's episode, I talk a little bit about what it takes to become a better developer. Nobody will ever expect you to know everything, but you better know how to find it... I'm trying out a new format with this video. Less scripted, more free-form, and with less visuals. Show More Summary

You Don’t Become a TDD Expert Overnight - Anna Filina

Do you want to write unit tests but don’t know where to begin? Don’t panic and follow these steps to ease into the testing business. Practice testing often to achieve best results. Tip: try to test the smallest unit possible, usually a function, rather than a combination of functions. Show More Summary

Speedy Sites and Why You Need Them - TechPortal

Anyone who went to the PHP Conference 2013 in London hopefully saw Ilia Alshanetsky’s talk on analysing bottlenecks in your application, which had some great techniques for how to test the performance of your site. This article assumes...Show More Summary

Level Crossings and Traffic Jams - thePHP.cc

20 Rules of Software Consulting - Paul M. Jones

Ask Not What’s Possible: the question is not what you can do, the question is how much the client is willing to pay for it and how long they will wait. Time Substitutes for Money on a Logarithmic Scale: e.g … Continue reading ?