I used to use an extension called XHP. It enables HTML-in-PHP syntax for generating front-end markup. I reached for it recently, and was surprised to find that it was no longer officially supported for modern PHP versions. So, I decided to implement a user-land version of it, using a basic state-machine compiler. It se...
I came across PHPBot the other day (not to be confused with Botman or Fondbot) – a “chatbot” which helps you look up PHP manual entries and generates example code for them. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I don’t believe in chatbots being chatbots – as someone who’s built some ...
Mimo is an app which claims to teach coding “on the go”. As a long time Duolingo user, I could relate to this approach – particularly as I was becoming increasingly interested in achieving some degree of basic Swift literacy in the coming weeks. In an attempt to objectively assess the app’s abi...
Workflow refers to both the process and the tools that are used in this process. Almost every developer comes up with a process of creating and finalizing the project deliverables. This process is implemented through a set of tools that the developer comes up with through trial and error. Once a workflow has been perfe...
Why is a string called a string? Have you ever given this some thought? We never use such a word in contexts other than programming for a set of letters sticking together, and yet – in programming it’s as pervasive as the word “variable”. Why is that, and where does it come from? To find out, we...
I didn’t start out writing tests for my code. Like many before and since, my “testing” was to write code and refresh the page. “Does it look right?”, I’d ask myself. If I thought so, I’d move on. In fact, most of the jobs I’ve had have been with companies who don’t ...
I had been reading The Phoenix Project, a great novel about IT (you read that right), which presents day to day IT and devops problems at a large Amazon-like company in a way which makes mortals understand the complexities and chaos of 21st century technology. Without giving away any spoilers, at one point in the book ...
As of late, it seems everyone and their proverbial grandma is talking about Machine Learning. Your social media feeds are inundated with posts about ML, Python, TensorFlow, Spark, Scala, Go and so on; and if you are anything like me, you might be wondering, what about PHP? Yes, what about Machine Learning and PHP? Fort...
When working in a medium to large team on the same codebase, it can sometimes become hard to understand each other’s code and how to use it. Various solutions exist to help with this. For example, you can agree to follow a set of coding standards to make the code more readable for each other, or use a framework t...
Unlike in our “mainstream” paid course about exploring PHP, I like to explore the weird and forgotten areas of the language. Recently, I ventured into a section of the PHP manual which lists extensions that are used to help with Human Language and Character Encoding. I had never looked at them as a whole &...
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