php[architect]

Despite the promise of a “paperless” office, we still need to create documents that print and render nearly-identically across devices and operating systems. PDFs have filled this niche nicely for end...

PHP was released in the fall of 1994, making 2019 the 25th anniversary of PHP! We’ve certainly come a long way from the early days of the web. I’m not sure how many people reading this were around bac...

In tech, we have a term that I despise. “Soft Skills” refers to skills that aren’t specific to hardware or software; they are skills that involve communication, social situations, and interacting with...

The first step to protecting your system is to understand the actions, behaviors, and motivations of those who would potentially breach and damage that system. Learning to think like an attacker is ex...

This month we study the Singleton Design Pattern, but with a twist. We start with a correct implementation but get it wrong by refactoring. We’ll examine the PHP generated code, each step of the way,...

It seems like programmers love their acronyms almost as much as the military does. When someone is just getting started in programming, they can be bombarded with an endless list of acronyms that peop...

In my first year of co-organizing the Chicago PHP User Group, I have learned a lot and met many wonderful people. Combining insights from the community with some of my own, I wanted to pass on some of...

The general opinion on legacy code is developers don’t like it. This article presents a few ways to deal with legacy code, so it’s an opportunity rather than a source of dread. I hope you’ll change yo...

According to PHP Framework Trends from Packagist, there were over 1,258 million downloads of open-source PHP frameworks in the last 12 months. That’s a huge number! But how many of them are on the lat...

PHP has changed a lot in the last few years. It is a faster and better language. With the improvement of the language, almost all the major frameworks also improved, including Symfony. In this article...