Posts

In about 5 months PHP 5.6 loses its security support. Which means that in 5 months, PHP loses its current Long Term Support(LTS) version. If you don’t count security only support as LTS, then PHP hasn’t had an LTS for the past 1.5 years. If your website can’t handle PHP 7 or higher, you may start finding it harder to get support for that, with hosting sites like acquia removing php 5.6 support We will look at the advantages, and disadvantages of LTS, and what it means for the PHP ecosystem.

Jul 24, 2018

Sometimes a code base has specific code style rules, that aren’t easy to detect with either with a style fixer or a static analyzer. So instead of having to tell every new contributor your rules during a PR, or lay them all out in your CONTRIBUTING.md, why not automatically check them with PHPUnit. We will look at a couple of different ‘rules’ your code base could have, and how to set up the automated tests.

Jun 28, 2018

Chances are you have written a switch case statement or two. Aren’t they much ‘cleaner’ than a bunch of if else statements? Today i would like to convince you that using switch case, in modern php, is a bad practice.

Jun 18, 2018

A little while ago someone ran into an error with a dependency of a project i worked on. A fatal error, which seemingly only occurred for them: the ctype_alnum function was not defined. So it turned out the ctype functions aren’t part of the php core, but are instead a ‘default’ extension. Lets explore what extensions mean for your project, and how to help your users with these kinds of errors.

Jun 12, 2018

Are your tests testing? Are you assertions asserting? Let’s find out how we can test that our tests are testing, with the mutation testing framework: infection.

Jun 10, 2018