The PHP Roundtable

So you spend most of your time programming in PHP. You meet another programmer out in the wild. You begin explaining what you do. Do you find yourself using vague terms and actively trying to avoid the word "PHP?" Do you dread the question, "What language do you primarily code in?" Do you anticipate them scoffing at you when you say, "PHP?"

Today the PHP Roundtable celebrates 2 years of generating nerdy discussions! We take a look behind the scenes of the PHP Roundtable podcast and chat with some nerds about what's going on the world of PHP.

Despite the fact that there was never an official release of PHP 6, it was going to be a real thing with a lot of great improvements to the engine and language. But why was this version of PHP never released? We talk with some previous and current internals developers to hear the story of what happened to PHP 6.

If you're just starting with programming & PHP, this episode is for you. We discuss some helpful tips to get you started with PHP programming such as some helpful learning resources and some common pitfalls to watch out for when learning to program.

We spend much of our time as developers managing the state in our applications. There are many different approaches and philosophies attributed to reading, mutating and storing state.

The demand for DevOps skills is growing more and more in modern web development. But all the hype and demand is met with myriad DevOps tools. Staying abreast of how these tools can help make our jobs easier can be daunting. So today we take a closer look at one of these tools called Docker which takes a microservices-architecture approach to managing your servers.

HTTP/1.1 will eventually be replaced by HTTP/2 so it's important for us PHP nerds to know all about the latest version of the HTTP protocol that's already running some of the internet's biggest websites. We discuss the things we need to know to start using HTTP/2 in our next PHP app.

If you've ever gotten a number of weird looking characters in your database or on your website like, "�" and didn't know why, then this episode is for you. Those bizarre characters called "mojibake", rear their ugly heads when we don't account for a consistent character encoding. Today we discuss what character encoding is, how to accommodate for it in HTML, PHP & your database, and how we can ensure we'll never encounter an unexpected alien character in our web apps again.

We record live from main stage at php|tek in St. Louis, MO. We discuss speaking at conferences and recent events in PHP-FIG.

Async? Isn't that like AJAX in Javascript or something? Most PHP developers encounter asynchronous code for the first time in Javascript, but not many are aware that PHP can do async too. We discuss asynchronous programming in PHP and how we might be able to implement it in our own projects using various libraries.