PHP Architect Podcasts

This month’s release touches on some examples that keep PHP and its community strong, relevant, and a fun language to code.

Ken Marks continues his series on using PHP and a Rasberry Pi in a real-world example with Raspberry Pi Part 2 – Installing the LAMP Stack on your Pi. As developers, we live a life where we are constantly learning, and Derek Binkley helps with this by contributing an article called Teaching Through Code Review. We have a bonus third feature article this month in which Gabriel Zerbib introduces us to a documentation concept with his contribution Introduction to Diagram-as-Code.

In Eric Mann’s Security Corner, he talks about how to expand your knowledge with Getting Started with Cybersecurity. Joe Ferguson takes time out of his busy schedule to show us some benefits to using PHP-FPM, such as running multiple versions of PHP in his The Workshop section article Configuring PHP-FPM and Apache. In Community Corner, Eric Van Johnson sits down and gets to know our second rookie release manager in his Interview with PHP 8.1 Release Manager Ben Ramsey. Edward Barnard continues his new DDD Alley series with this month’s installment of When You Know the Pattern. Oscar Merida helps us exercise our learning muscle with this month’s PHP Puzzles, Finding Integer Factors. In this month’s Education Station, Chris Tankersly gives his take on the elusive async development with PHP in his article Async is a Lie. Wrapping up this month’s release is Beth Tucker Long finally{}, Everything Which Way But Loose.

As 2021 fades from our memories, we hope that a few of you received fantastic geeky gifts during the holidays. Hopefully, some of those geeky gifts included Raspberry Pis. Over the next few months, we will build a project with one and hopefully inspire you to create something useful for yourself.

This is also a great time to establish some resolutions to aid in your coding career. What do you want to accomplish this year? Continuing education is always a great goal and something that we here at PHP Architect strive to provide. We ourselves are constantly learning how we can improve our process and one of our New Year’s Resolutions is to be more prompt in our monthly delivery. We’re aware this will take another few months, but it is our goal.

Now I want to take a moment to ask you for a favor. Have you ever wanted to be a “published writer”? Maybe you still need a New Years Resolution. We’ll help you keep it 😉 As a magazine for our community, we rely on community members to write articles for us. And better yet, we pay for your content to be published. So take a moment and ask yourself a few questions. “Have I learned anything new recently that helped me?” “Do I want to learn a new skill to share with other people? Sometimes having an article deadline will help you focus and learn that skill. Honestly, this point has helped me write all of my articles and conference talks. If you are interested, please send an email to [email protected] with your ideas, and we will help you turn your idea into a publishable article.

This month’s issue gets started with “Introducing FilterIterators” by Mauro Chojrin. This feature article will get you looking at your projects in a whole new way. Our second feature is the first in a series called “How to Hack your Home with a Raspberry Pi” by Kenneth Marks. I’ve always been fascinated by the Raspberry Pi but have always been intimidated by them. Ken is opening my eyes, and now I want to use them everywhere.

Our columnists have been hard at work too. Joe Ferguson’s, The Workshop, is giving younger developers a course on “Apache and PHP – Back to Basics.” Every developer should have more of an understanding of what happens even before their PHP code fires up and starts handling a request. In Education Station, Chris Tankersly is talking about “Background Queues” to improve performance for our applications. Eric Mann brings us “The Terrifying Scale of a Security Bug” in this month’s Security Corner. If you’re out on the hunt for a job, make sure you understand the basics of the “Infamous Fizz Buzz” in this month’s PHP Puzzles by Oscar Merida. Then Eric Van Johnson does a great interview with Patrick Allaert, one of your PHP 8.1 Release Managers.

And finally{}, Beth Tucker-Long talks “Experts or Out-of-touch?” where she shares some of her past with PHP Internals.

As always, thank you for subscribing to PHP Architect. We have big plans for 2022, and we hope you do too.

In this issue, Doug Dobrzynski helps us focus while programming with his article, Mindful Programming. While this article isn’t PHP specific, if you take time to digest what he’s talking about, I think you will find that all of us could benefit from using daily mindful techniques. In his article, Lessons Learned from Building a WebSocket Server, Torsten Dittmann shows us some of the considerations that had to be made when adding a real-time component to their API. And a bonus feature article from Ed Barnard will help us write better database interactions with Designing For MySQL Transaction Failures.

Our columns continue to offer great content as well. In our Security Corner, Eric Mann brings us Vulnerable and Outdated Components, which made me run and check my servers right away. Chris Tankersly talks about Why We Argue About PHP Upgrades and Changes in Education Station. Community Corner brings more information on some of this year’s turbulent transition of PHP Internals with The PHP Foundation. Joe Ferguson goes into The Workshop and shows us a possible way to speed up Laravel applications with Octane & RoadRunner. Ed Barnard also continues his Here Be Dragons column with Solution Space, where he wants to help us have fun in our craft of programming. Oscar Merida brings another excellent PHP Puzzle where we try to find our Break-Even Point. And finally{}, Beth Tucker-Long rounds out this issue with a follow-up to last month’s Roll With It titled Still Rolling.

This month, we dive into Libsodium, discuss gatekeeping, learn more about data access, and why even something that might be considered a “small bug” can cause massive damage.

I’m not sure how many people read these Editorials. It’s even been explained to me that this isn’t an “Editorial.” Ha, the joke’s on them; I’m not an editor, sooooo yeah. I always enjoyed reading what Oscar had to say about the articles in the month’s issues and seeing what little nuggets of knowledge he shared.

I am not sure if I have any actual words of wisdom to share, but that’s never stopped me from talking before, so I don’t see why that would change now. We’ve been talking a lot about change lately, but the reality is, “change” is what our industry is about. Sure there are personal changes. People change jobs, leave projects, organizers of User Groups move away, but our industry also changes. What we consider “good security practices” today can be viewed as a horrible implementation tomorrow. Anyone who has worked on a legacy codebase for enough time knows the feeling of looking at code and thinking, “why was it done like this? This is terrible”, then checking the commit logs and realizing they did the coding and remember, “Oh right, that is how we did this five years ago.”

In this issue, Vinícius Campitelli returns to follow up his article from last month with more cryptography talk. This month he talks specifically about *Cryptography with Libsodium*, what it is, why you should be using it, and how you should be using it. In *Exploring the Active Record Pattern,* Alexandros Gougousis discusses the popular Active Record Pattern and some of the benefits of using this pattern to handle persisting data to the backend database.

In Security Corner this month, Eric Mann takes us on a personal journey with a bug report for a package he was maintaining in his article *No Bug Too Small,* and as you can probably guess from the title, the “small bug” was a big problem. Moving on to Joe Ferguson’s *The Workshop* article *Intro to Craft CMS*, Joe talks about one of the PHP powerhouses in the CMS market, CraftCMS. Built on the Yii framework, Joe takes you from install to asset management and gets your CMS up and running in a matter of a couple of pages. *Education Station’s* Chris Tankersley returns us to our data access discussion with *Handling Data Access* and jumps into different ways to handle data access, including raw access to abstraction layers and back to data access layers. This month, Oscar Merida continues to toy with our minds and emotions in his PHP Puzzles column about *Compounding Interest.* He then challenges us with another economic puzzle to finish out the year. Also, this month, I had the pleasure to speak with Wasseem Khayratte, aka 7PHP, in this month’s *Community Corner*. I learned more about what got him involved with the PHP community and his new role as the voice behind Voices of the elePHPant. In this month’s *Here Be Dragons: Problem Space*, Edward touches on a couple of topics most of us had been through at some point in our careers, Burn Out and Gatekeeping. And in finally{} Beth Tucker Long discusses her *Roll With It* philosophy and the idea of embracing change. Thanks for being a reader and I hope you enjoy this issue.

Eric Van Johnson and John Congdon interview feature contributor Vinícius Campitelli about his article Cryptography with Libsodium.

According to the just-released 2021 version of OWASP Top 10 (a curated list of the most critical web application security risks out there), “Cryptographic Failures” are the 2nd most important of the many security concerns we should have as web developers. These concerns include a lot of misuses of cryptographic systems, like choosing weak algorithms, poor randomness sources, or usage of deprecated methods. That is why this is also the second article covering the main topics for cryptography: on our last issue, we covered the main theory, which sometimes is the cause of those errors mentioned above, and right now we will see how to use libsodium, a modern library with the most recommended algorithms already built-in and no weak settings available per default. It is a cross-platform tool, available to use on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and has been included in PHP’s core since 7.2. It also has bindings for Java, NodeJS, Python, Go, and several other languages. So we are safe to say it runs pretty much everywhere. The official website is libsodium.org, and you can find the full documentation there instead of the PHP.net manual as it is sometimes not complete. There is also a Quick Reference and a “Using Libsodium in PHP Projects” article.

Eric and John talk about their first release and the October 2021 issue, Decrypting Cryptography

Topics Covered

* Cryptography 101

* What I Wish Something Told Me About SQL Database Design

* Education Station: Windows 11 for PHP Development

* The Workshop: Nitro

* Design Patterns by Moonlight: The Dragon Wrangling Pattern

* Sebastian Bergmann and the PHPUnit project part 2

* Security Corner: Updating the OWASP Top Ten

* PHP Puzzles: Time Value of Money

* finally{}: Rubber Ducky, You’re the One!

Eric van Johnson and John Congdon interview Tomas Votruba, who wrote an article on Why Would Anyone Want to Downgrade Their PHP Code? in the September 2021 issue.

Topics Covered

* Downgrading PHP Code and why this might be a good workflow for you

* Rector – Instant Upgrades and Automated Refactoring

* The power of automated refactoring.

Eric, John, and Oscar talk about changes behind the screen and the September 2021 issue, It’s Really an Upgrade.

Topics Covered

* Changes in ownership at php[architect]

* The Rector project: using it to upgrade and downgrade library code.

* CQRS: using it to scale database reads and writes.

* JWTs and Security

* Livewire and JavaScript front end frameworks for PHP developers

* Sebastian Bergmann and the PHPUnit project

* Xdebug tutorials on YouTube

* MVC pattern in PHP applications

* Animating Life with Imagick

* Why its a good thing that PHP is “the Worst” and why that makes it successful.

* Why its essential to keep learning.

Eric, John, and Oscar sit down to go over the August 2021 issue, Trimming One’s Sails.

Topics Covered

* Grokking algebraic structures and functional programming with PHP

* Laravel Horizon and diving into worker queues

* Multi-factor authentication and why you should use add it to your application.

* Testing with Pest PHP and how it’s different from PhpUnit.

* Eric’s interview with Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel.

* Annotations, using them in legacy code and PHP 8’s implementation.

* Interfaces and patterns for using them.

* How step debugging improves your productivity.

Eric van Johnson and John Congdon interview Scott Keck-Warren, who wrote an article on Boosting User Perceived Performance with Laravel Horizon, in the August 2021 issue.

Topics Covered

* Getting started programming with QBasic

* Working with PHP, Laravel, and picking up new languages.

* Scaling with queues and tasks to send surveys and synchronize data.

* The benefits of using Horizon.

* Building a youtube channel for new PHP developers.