Blog Profile / Planet PHP

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 ?

AtlantaPHP - thePHP.cc

Effective Presentation Writing and Delivering - Anna Filina

I have been speaking at, attending and organizing conferences for the last 7 years. I have enough to say about this topic to write a book, so I’ll stick with an overview and let you fill in the details with your creativity. This post...Show More Summary

Predicting Random Numbers In PHP – It’s Easier Than You Think! - Pádraic Brady

The Zend Framework team recently released versions 2.0.8 and 2.1.4 to address a number of potential security issues including advisory ZF2013-02 “Potential Information Disclosure and Insufficient Entropy vulnerabilities in Zend\Math\Rand and Zend\Validate\Csrf Components”. Show More Summary

Abstraction In The Real World - Brandon Savage

Abstraction is one of the subjects in software development that’s really difficult to fully grasp without practice. It’s easy to read about it, talk about it, and profess doing it. To actually do it is another thing entirely: it requires practice, and patience, and experimentation. I decided the best way to show abstraction in action [...]

HubFlow 1.5.1 Released - Stuart Herbert

Over the weekend, I released v1.5.1 of HubFlow – a Git extension that brings the gitflow workflow to GitHub. The key new features are: New ‘git hf push’ and ‘git hf pull’ commands, which do the right thing no matter which kind of branch...Show More Summary

First Phing Plugin - Lorna Mitchell

I'm a huge fan of Phing and use it regularly for build and deployment tasks. Often, I'll ask about a plugin that I wish existed, and get a very courteous "patches welcome" from the nice people in the #phing channel on freenode. ThisShow More Summary

Build queries for Lucene/Solr indexes in PHP - Lars Strojny

We use Solr a lot at InterNations. Beside usual full text searches, we use it every time we need to receive documents nearly free of charge. It is fast, it is stable and, after some wrestling, our data import works very well as well. For...Show More Summary

Why WordPress needs to get Decoupled - Henri Bergius

Couple of days ago there was an interesting post on the Dire State of WordPress, talking about the issues developers have when working with this hugely popular content management system: When you learn PHP from WordPress as I (and probably...Show More Summary

Like Athletes, Developers Need Practice Before Performing - Anna Filina

Developers always learn new things. They read books and blogs. They attend conferences and workshops. They are expected to apply this newfound knowledge in their projects to increase software performance, security and quality. But projects are all about delivery. Show More Summary

Distill: An opportunity to get out of your comfort zone - Davey Shafik

As part of my work at Engine Yard I have been involved in helping shape and organize a new conference, Distill, which will be held on Treasure Island in San Francisco, CA on August 8-9th 2013. The conference will bring together a bunch of folks from different technological backgrounds to share information, and cross-pollinate ideas. Show More Summary