Learn PHP For Experienced Developers

Posted on Posted in Development, Learning, PHP

In my efforts to help a colleague, I discovered that there are few resources for people who are already programmers in other languages to learn PHP. Something that isn’t beginner level, doesn’t explain basic programming concepts… just get to the heart of what makes PHP unique, and some suggested quality resources to learn more.

This is what I’ve written here. It’s a high-level overview of the language, and some vetted resources to get set up and learn more.

Let’s get started…

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Let’s Talk About: Coercive Software Design

Posted on Posted in Development

We become developers with the understanding that our mission with the software we create is to meet the needs of users. But what happens when the software we create is being used to change or coerce the behaviour of users, rather than help them work, play and behave the way they want to? What are the ethical considerations of developing software that tries to manipulate users? Where does the profit-driven motivation go too far?

Coercive: using force to persuade people to do things that they are unwilling to do. (Cambridge Dictionary)

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Board Games For Couples & Families

Posted on Posted in Games, Life

I’ve had a number of people ask me for board game recommendations for couples, families or friends who want to have fun while trapped in the house. My husband and I have a growing collection and a very specific focus on co-operative and indirectly-competitive board games. Here’s a quick write-up and details of our favourites.

Disclaimer – husband & I run on the nerdy side so many of these are not mainstream at all.

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Combating Phone Addiction: Try, Fail & Try Again

Posted on Posted in About, Life

Let me preface this by saying that this post discusses my own experiences and observations in my life. Your perspective may vary, and what works for me or is a problem for me, may not be so in your life. That’s ok, we’re all different and awesome.

My husband and I are on round 4 (ish) of our attempts to renew our resolutions to find a healthier balance of our phone and online use. As a web developer it’s tempting to almost live online, but at least for us, that’s a fast track to unhappiness. Luckily it hasn’t been an extreme problem- it hasn’t interfered with our careers or parenting or physical health. But there have definitely been some concequences of too much phone use.

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Legacy PHP Application: PHP Code Sniffer Compatibility Standard

Posted on Posted in PHP

Part 1 of this series covers a tour of my 14+ year old legacy CMS called LampLight and it continues with my use of command line code analysis tools to migrate it from PHP v 5.6 to 7.3. In this part I’ll use PHP_CodeSniffer to check my applications compatibility with PHP v 7.3 and beyond.

Let’s not fuss around, and instead dive right into the meat of this post. At the root of my project I run:

phpcs --standard=PHPCompatibility --extensions=php,inc,lib -s --runtime-set testVersion 7.3- .
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Legacy PHP Application: PHP CS Fixer & PHP Code Sniffer for PSR1 & PSR2

Posted on Posted in PHP

Part 1 of this series covers a tour of my 14+ year old legacy CMS called LampLight and it continues with my use of command line code analysis tools to migrate it from PHP v 5.6 to 7.3. In this part we’ll continue to use PHP CS Fixer to clean up the code, and will then move on to use PHP Code Sniffer for even more tidying.

My last few uses of PHP Coding Standards Fixer, are to check for PSR1 and PSR2 compliance. These PSRs cover a baseline of code style conventions common among PHP projects.

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Legacy PHP Application: Code Analysis With PHP CS Fixer

Posted on Posted in PHP

In part one of this series we took a tour into my 14+ year old legacy CMS called LampLight. It’s an oldie but a goodie and it needs some love because it’s still in use by a couple clients and myself. We are migrating it from PHP v 5.6 to 7.3. In this part we’ll use PHP CS Fixer to identify problems and clean things up.

PHP Short Tags and Closing Tags

Talk has been cheap for some time regarding the deprecation of the short opening tag <? for PHP, and its removal has had a few false starts. Finally, a PSR for this change has passed and it will officially be deprecated in v 7.4.

We also want to eliminate the closing PHP tag in files that contain only PHP. These two issues are quite straightforward, so let’s use these as an easy dip-of-the-toe into using command line code analysis tools to have a look at our code. We can even use these tools to make the changes for us.

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Legacy PHP Application Tour & Upgrade

Posted on Posted in PHP

The process of migrating my applications from PHP 5.6 -> 7.3 has been a long one – mainly due to limited time to work on it, and additional tasks being added to the migration list. But I’ve finally made it through the low hanging fruit of easy client sites and am now migrating the first project with a significant amount of back end PHP code. In this case, it’s a legacy CMS I wrote 14+ years ago called LampLight Content Manager.

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