Published: February 06, 2016
From a KCPUG lightning talk given on 03 Feb 2016 January was a relatively light month in PHP. Yet, we saw an exciting new microframework get its first non-beta release. PHP Updates Security and bugfix updates to PHP were released in January. Upgrade if you have a version less than: - 7.0.2 - 5.6.17 - 5.5.31 CMSes Drupal and WordPress…
Read more...Published: January 06, 2016
From a KCPUG lightning talk given on 06 Jan 2016 December was a busy month in PHP. A major update to PHP was released, PHP-FIG approved a new PSR, major CMSes had major releases and/or were patched, and frameworks had major, minor, and patch releases. PHP 7.0.1 PHP 7.0 was released on 3 December and was patched to 7.0.1 two…
Read more...Published: November 29, 2015
I have been a professional developer for over a year and a half now. About a year ago, my friend and mentor, John Kary, asked me how the job measured up to my expectations. I replied, honestly, that my expectations were met. However, I hadn't given it much thought since I was busy trying to learn so many new things.…
Read more...Published: November 13, 2015
2015 was my year to really dive into PHP. Up until this year, PHP was hobby language for me -- much as Python, Haskell, C++, Dart, JavaScript, and Java have been hobby languages. Granted, last year I finally took a job where PHP is where I spend half of my time. This year, I took up intensive study of PHP.…
Read more...Published: August 13, 2015
The "switch" statement within various languages, contains a similar structure. This makes the PHP switch statement familiar. A failing example of PHP's switch statement was brought up yesterday at work. Someone asked why the expected responses to this were not received. php <?php $convertQ = function ($str) { switch ($str) { case 0: return 'no'; case 'No': return 'no'; case…
Published: July 08, 2015
I was studying the arrayfilter in PHP and was enjoying coming up with a test that could help me learn better arrayfilter magic. For instance, to filter all words whose first letter is a vowel, I created this PHPUnit test: php public function testFilterVowelWords() { $vowel = function ($word) { $vowels = ["a", "e", "i", "o", "u"]; return inarray($word[0], $vowels);…
Published: May 08, 2015
On Wednesday, I took an extended lunch break in order to take the Zend PHP Certification test at a local Pearson VUE Testing Center. After a few years of using PHP and studying for a few months, I am a Zend Certified PHP Engineer! Books that have helped me: - Programming PHP, 3rd Ed by Kevin Tatroe, Peter MacIntyre, &…
Read more...Published: April 28, 2015
I attended Lone Star PHP last year with much hope and even more trepidation as to my abilities to hold my own with other members of the PHP community. I was the recipient of the Lone Star PHP scholarship, so my attendance and stay were taken care of by the conference sponsors (thank you! thank you! thank you!). I spent…
Read more...Published: April 27, 2015
The first day of Lone Star 2015 was devoted to training. The workshop track I took was geared towards unit testing. Getting Started with PHPUnit - Matt Frost - Twitter: @shrtwhitebldguy - Slides One reason I took this workshop was so that I could become more familiar with mocks. I had a mental block when it comes to mocks and…
Read more...Published: April 23, 2015
Heredoc Heredoc will define a string of text in a what-you-see-is-what-you-mean type of format. So, if you want to echo out structured text, like so: text I think that I Shall never pay As much as I Have for 2015-04-23 You would put it in a heredoc like this: php $today = date('Y-m-d'); $poem = <<<HTML I think that I…