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PHP Deployer

I haven’t used it yet, but based on the intro docs and kicking a few tires, deployer seems like a fine “implemented in PHP” deployment system — or maybe I’m just a sucker for any modern PHP system that hasn’t jumped on the type safety bandwagon.

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GoLang: Arrays vs. Slices

Just using the old blog as a bookmark service for this arrays v. slices in Go articles. I think this came across my radar a year or so ago because the official go docs sort of blow past arrays to get to the “new” stuff. If you’re in a hurry — Overall, slices are cleaner, more flexible, and less bug-prone than [...]

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PHP Generators From Scratch

Generators landed back in PHP 5.5 and I’ve mostly ignored them. I had a vague understanding that they were a feature that allowed you to build iterators that didn’t require loading up a huge data structure with all your information. This also seemed to be the gist of most online generator tutorials. So, in the practical world [...]

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PHP and Amazon Lambda

I did another quick survey of what’s state of the art for PHP and Amazon’s Lambda (i.e. Serverless, i.e. Amazon will run a function for you in the cloud that can respond to HTTP requests and interact with Amazon’s various services, getting you out of the sys-admin business). One project I see cropping up in my various [...]

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Magento 2 Travis File

I just updated my example Magento 2 travis build file to work with the newer versions of M2 coming out of GitHub. This file does the heavy lifting of cloning an M2 Magento repo, running the installer, and adding the composer module you want to test to the project. Travis remains one of those how is this free wonders for anyone doing [...]

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Just Enough C for PHP: Make Basics

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Just Enough C for PHP. Earlier posts include Just Enough C for PHP, Just Enough C for PHP: Running C Programs, Just Enough C for PHP: Variables and Types, Just Enough C for PHP: C Macros, and There's no Such Thing as PHP. This is the most recent post in the series. So far in this series we’ve [...]

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Building PHP From Source

I’m still finding the PHP Internals Books to be a welcome breath of fresh air. Today is was their instructions on getting a working build enviornment for the PHP-SRC repo up and running. Straight forward, no nonsense instructions. There’s a bit of assuming you know your way around compiling things but that’s always [...]

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Fuzzing PHP

Fuzzers are a category of security testing software that will throw all sorts of random data at a software system looking for flaws that can then be exploited by individual penetration testers. Sort of like throwing a bunch of paint around the room trying to find the invisible man. I found this talk about a PHP Internals Fuzzer from [...]

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Cracking Foundation

This post by Julia Evans (author and artist of the amazing Bite Sized Linux zine) caught my eye. I can’t tell if this is an old-man-computer thing or if it’s a legitimate troubling trend (probably both), but as consumer web sites increasingly become a Squarespace/Wix sort of thing and not a DIY sort of thing, the DIY tools [...]

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A Few Notes on Zephir

Zephir is a programming language for building PHP extensions. As in, the .so files that extend the PHP language itself. Normally you need to use the C programming language to create a PHP extension, but Zephir is an intermediate language you can compile down to C code, (using the provided tooling). Its build system also automatically [...]

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Never Gonna Give you Up

In the begining (or near enough to it), PHP had a set of functions for talking to MySQL databases — mysql_connect, mysql_query, mysql_.... While newer database APIs like the mysqli_ functions and PDO came along these older functions hung in there and remained hugely popular right up until the end. The end being their removal from [...]

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