php[architect]

Recently, we've discussed principles for writing clean code in your php applications. Testing is a valuable technique to help you produce and maintain a codebase, but it can be daunting to learn. In t...

It's been a long time since I talked about certifications. The last time I did it publicly was back in 2008 when I wrote a blog post about it. A piece that got a lot of strong responses, and almost co...

If you've never been to the deserts of Arizona here in the U.S., you may think it's a desolate and harsh land. Perhaps you envision Mad Max-style cars driving around looking for fuel and water. Maybe...

While no list regarding security, risks, or best practices can ever be exhaustive, they often serve as decent starting points. Understanding some of the most common classes of security mistakes is a g...

Truly mastering a skill means passing that skill onto others. What if the skill is so prohibitively difficult it's not possible to pass on, not in your lifetime? Nathaniel Bowditch faced this problem...

This month, we're going to dive into a practical application of Ansible by building a playbook with roles to implement a fully functional Linux, MySQL, PHP, and NGINX web server. By the end, you shoul...

Browsers are everywhere, in a wide range of different devices. However, despite this, browsers mostly follow the same standards and operate in similar ways. Let's take a look at what differentiates th...

If you read part one of this series, you'd have a pretty good idea of what my life was like before treatment and during my first few months on the road to wellness. I went from having an irrational fe...

Arrays are a core feature of the PHP language, and so easy to use many developers don't go beyond them. Fixating on arrays as the uber-data structure, while tempting, can rapidly lead to unmaintainabl...

The first article in this series, found in the November 2019 issue, focused on the "what" in object-oriented programming; that is, fundamental concepts and related features offered by PHP and what tho...