php[architect]

The tech industry is a double-edged sword. On the one side, we (generally) have well-paying jobs with nice perks, but on the other, we can easily slip into not only boring, repetitive work but figurat...

In a previous issue, we discussed technical debt—the small compromises made by a development team to ship a product. Over time, every team should try to "pay down" this debt by investing time in refac...

PHP developers can now easily share their code for others to use. You can also easily bundle your application’s domain logic into a package to share between multiple projects. This month we are diving...

Continuing our series on the sins of programming, I want to touch on the sin of gluttony in programming. (And no, I don’t mean to infer anything about the size of our waists.) Over the years, over dec...

This month we have a “cookbook” of producer-consumer programming examples. We work through a complete example of timing production web page loads. We then consider techniques for message versioning, f...

In everyday work, it’s easy to forget just how many things are happening under the hood, how many concepts are abstracted away to make our code run and make it run efficiently. It wasn’t always the ca...

After designing and coding many computer games, I recently got around to designing and publishing a tabletop game. But wait, a board game is hardware! Using PHP to design a board game seems unconventi...

Zend Expressive is the latest iteration of Zend Framework. Like a lot of modern frameworks, it supports a lot of command line tooling to make life easier when bootstrapping applications with it. In Ze...

Structured Query Language, or SQL, was a boring, ho-hum declarative programming language for many years until the fairly recent additions of common table expressions and windowing functions. CTEs and...

Mental health issues are prevalent across the globe, in all walks of life. In my anecdotal experience, however, I have observed a huge number of people speaking out about mental health issues they hav...