php[architect]

Most self-taught developers in our industry learn to leverage an API long before they spend time learning lower-level coding patterns. This experience isn’t necessarily a bad thing. All the same, it’s...

I was researching user groups on various websites such as php.ug and friendsofphp.org, as well as Meetup for work. As I did, I saw three trends forming which I’m sharing here.

Our systems truly evolve and change for the better when folks privileged by oppressive systems, who might reap some benefits from a destructive status quo, decide they would prefer a better, richer, m...

Practice makes perfect, except when writing PHP code! Our new column Pragmatic PHP explains patterns and variations I’ve used over the years. The better we understand a pattern, the better we can succ...

Last month we covered the basics of PDF generation by focusing on the FPDF library. We generated a custom PDF by placing cells on the page and adding data to those cells. FPDF is a relatively low-leve...

Developers are a fickle, passionate bunch. We love to wage arguments over which is the best editor (obviously it’s VIM), what is the best operating system to develop on (Linux), what is the best langu...

When your everyday grind is a monolithic, legacy, PHP application from the early 2000s, it can be hard to utilize the newer tools and technologies that are becoming available. Fortunately, there’s a p...

You have unit and integration tests to ensure your application operates as intended and you don’t have to test in production. What happens (or fails to happen) when a large number of users wants to ta...

In general, we perceive the frontend part of a user-facing application as difficult to test in an automated way, and we often relegate these checks to a manual task. In this article, we examine how to...