php[architect]

In its early days, the Internet was all about sharing static data like images, flat text files, and downloadable binaries. The early Internet's static nature was useful in for sharing information. In...

Given that (in the USA) COVID-19 appears to be here to stay for quite a while, I know several people who are searching for jobs during this time. It does make the interview process rough, or at least...

In part two, I continue chatting with the PHP 8 Release Managers about PHP Internals, preparing a new release, the evolution of the language, and where it might go in the future.

An oft-overlooked aspect of any security practice or policy is its usability. Do the checks and controls added for the sake of security make the system harder for end-users to do their jobs? An unusab...

This month, "The Quest," takes us on a quest to avoid the Big Ball of Mud. We'll begin by learning what the Big Ball of Mud is. Our quest will discover that Domain-Driven Design (DDD) can be our solut...

Does a recent announcement by Microsoft have you wondering how you'll continue to use Windows for PHP development? Anyone with a compiler and the PHP source code should be able to build a PHP executab...

In our documentation at work, there are a few places where we list things as strings but look suspiciously like Boolean values. This realization sparked a discussion at work around data types, but not...

In our last issue, we looked at a problem from game development—generating random loot with different rarities. We saw multiple solutions, including a common technique used in many games. Our new puzz...

Until recently, there were two schools of thought. Use a traditional relational database with normalized data or a structureless NoSQL database. If you could get avoid designing your database schema a...

Interested in NoSQL document databases, but discouraged by a lack of a standard query language? Let's put the SQL back in NoSQL. In this article, let's explore how a NoSQL document database models dat...