The PHP podcast where everyone chimes in.
The PHP podcast where everyone chimes in.
Late August (tentative)
Self-taught PHP programmers, even those of us with decades of experience, would likely fail a tech interview in an epic way. If you've ever wanted to work for a big tech company like Google, Amazon or Facebook but have always been too nervous about the tech interview, this episode is for you.
We chat about what we need to do to be fully prepared for a tech interview. And maybe soon you'll be showing your friends how to reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard.
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PHP has had support for coroutines since PHP 5.5 and it allows you to do some really cool non-blocking stuff. We chat about concurrency in PHP and how we might be able to use it to speed up our apps.
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New accessibility guidelines are coming down the pipe that will impact our apps with the new WCAG 2.1. We chat about what the guidelines are and how we can start preparing our apps for them.
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Secrets, secrets, are no fun, all they do is cause pain when trying to deploy to production. By secrets, we're talking about database passwords, API keys, and other credentials that we want to keep from prying eyes.
There are a number of solutions out there to keep our secrets out of the codebase and in a more secure area. We discuss the options we have for managing secrets and the tradeoffs for using them.
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Static analysis is a fancy word to describe a tool that looks at our code and gives us helpful hints on how to improve it. We'll be discussing what static analyzers do, which tools the PHP community has access to, and how we can incorporate the tools into our daily development flow.
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We finally unveil the super-secret project to the world! Listen in to find out what it is and how you can get your hands on one.
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The next major version of PHP is here! PHP 7.2 comes with a nice set of upgrades, performance enhancements, and a brand new crypto library right out of the box. We discuss some of the features and breaking changes that we should be aware of before upgrading to PHP 7.2.
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We chat about backwards compatibility, Gutenberg, and the WordPress ecosystem.
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We're still alive! We come off our hiatus to have an informal catch-up session with some PHP friends. And proof of the secret PHP Roundtable project is revealed to Chris & Joe.
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PHP is known for running really bad code really well. But it has a dirty little secret: deep within its code is a hidden "stack bomb". You can cause PHP to completely crash with just a few lines of code. Today we discuss why this happens and what we can do to fix the issue.
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In an industry like software engineering where it seems like there's always something else to learn, it's easy to come down with a case of imposter syndrome. We chat about imposter syndrome's impact on the PHP community and contrast it with the Dunning-Kruger effect.
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After years of resisting, SammyK finally drank the Docker Kool-Aid for his everyday client work. We talk about his transition from Vagrant to Docker and some bumps he hit along the way.
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Adding tests to php-src is a great way to get involved with PHP internals. Don't know how to get started? You're in luck. TestFest 2017 is going to be a thing in September. User groups and individuals around the world are going to organize to learn how to add tests to PHP and become official internals contributors.
It has been 7 years since the last TestFest in 2010. We chat about how to get involved with TestFest 2017.
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We take a deep-dive into the underlaying structure of the the PHP source code and talk about the scanner, parser, the new AST layer (and the evil things we can do with it), and the Zend engine. Let's see how the PHP sausage is made!
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We have a mashup recording with PHPUgly and PHP Town Hall during the community night at php[tek] 2017. We chat about OSMI, UUID's, git, product development, getting involved in the PHP community and funky socks.
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Dependency Injection has been a design principle that the PHP community has embraced more fully than a lot of other programming communities. There's even an official PHP-FIG standard being discussed called PSR-11 which will standardize dependency injection containers. Today we chat all things dependency injection.
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No matter how experienced you are as a programmer, at some point your app will generate errors and crash. Fixing problems with your app quickly is paramount in order to affect as little of your user base as possible. We discuss what is involved with implementing effective logging and crash reporting techniques in PHP to help you keep your apps up and running like a well-oiled machine.
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PHP 7.1, the latest minor version of PHP, was released on December 1st. We discuss some things that went on behind-the-scenes that brought this new version to a stable release and we look at some new features that we can start taking advantage of today.
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Guzzle has become the de-facto HTTP-client library for PHP. But recently a number of open source projects have been switching to HTTPlug which boasts itself as an HTTP-client abstraction. We chat about the problems HTTPlug aims to solve, the plans for its future and the reasons behind why some library maintainers have chosen to adopt it or not.
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There's a lot more going on at Zend other than Zend Framework. We chat about the Zend ecosystem, from Apigility to Zend Certification and what Zend's role is in PHP internals.
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There are two seemingly contradicting philosophies about how to charge clients for programming work. The hourly camp suggests that the client is paying for your skill and hiring you for your time. The value-based pricing camp suggests that the programmer should price a project based on its value to the client instead of the hours it will take to build it. Today we chat about these two ideas and discuss the pros and cons of both.
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We chat about the open-source Behavior-Driven Development framework called Behat. We get a brief overview of how Behat can help us write more reliable code and also explore some best-practices when writing automated tests.
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We chat about security in the the PHP community, encryption & hashing in PHP and a new-hotness crypto library called libsodium.
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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?"
We discuss why PHP has such a bad rep in the eyes of many and why some of us feel the need to start conversations with, "I use PHP but let me explain..."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Event Sourcing pattern is an approach to managing application state. If we think of any given state of our app as a frame in a video, Event Sourcing allows us to scrub through past states of the app. Today we discuss what Event Sourcing is and how we can start integrating it into our PHP apps.
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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.
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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.
We also go briefly off topic to discuss the status of PHP 7.1 and the ramsey/uuid lib.
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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.
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We record live from main stage at php|tek in St. Louis, MO. We discuss speaking at conferences and recent events in PHP-FIG.
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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. We also take a look at how async features could be added to PHP core to support async natively.
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We record live from Lone Star PHP 2016 in Dallas, TX. We discuss what DI Containers aren't, tradeoffs to making things easy, how to improve your dev skills, repercussions of depending on Composer, PHP 7.1 features and we give away a white Confoo elePHPant.
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The technologies that run the web are constantly changing. We discuss strategies for staying on top of the constant flux with continuous learning throughout your career, having mentors, engaging regularly with your peers, contributing to open source projects, voracious reading, and travel to programming events.
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The PHP-FIG has really helped the PHP community get onboard the collaboration train with really great standards like the PSR-4 autoloading standard and the PSR-7 HTTP message interfaces.
We discuss PSR-0 through PSR-13 and the process they go through to become standards. We also discuss where the FIG came from and the possible big changes coming to the organization soon.
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Traditional relational databases like MySQL or Postgres are really good at providing many solutions to the problem of persisting state. But these types of database are really horrible at querying highly connected models in an efficient way.
Graph databases like Neo4j and OrientDB excel at highly connected data. In fact, graph technologies are the backbone of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. We discuss how to think about our data using the graph model and what tools we can use in our PHP projects to interface with them. We also discuss the considerations we'll need to make when deciding whether or not to use a graph database in our next project.
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We get an update on status of the project we discussed in part 1 and discuss next steps to take our dance event management app idea to production.
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New features of PHP get added via the request for comments process. We chatting with a few RFC authors about what features they are proposing for the next major version of PHP.
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Object-relational mapping (ORM) tools are a great way to model relational databases in your codebase. We discuss the benefits that ORM tools can add to our apps, some problems with the ORM model and where the PHP community seems to be heading when it comes to persisting data. We'll also discuss the opposing active record & data mapper paradigms.
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We bring room 11 chat room from Stack Overflow to the Roundtable. We discuss security, PSR-6, Magic the Gathering, PHP 7 and kittens.
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Immutability plays a huge role in functional programming and many languages support immutability directly; like the readonly keyword in C#. It is possible to create immutable objects in PHP, but the language lacks inherent immutable features for scalar variables and class properties. We discuss how to bring functional programming concepts to PHP and brainstorm some features that could possibly be added to future versions of PHP to offer better immutability support.
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Believe it or not, there's a lot more to debugging your PHP code than var_dump()'ing all the things. We discuss how to use debugging tools to help us comprehensively debug our codebase.
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With a new design pattern coming out every week it can be easy to get caught up in all the hype. If you frequently try to implement the latest-and-greatest design pattern and feel constantly paralyzed by the thought, "I know I'm doing this wrong," this episode is for you.
We discuss how "not seeing the forest for the trees" might be a good thing as we try to narrow our focus in order to write better code without thinking of patterns first.
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User groups are core to the strength of the PHP community. We discuss what it takes to run a solid user group in your area; finding food & venue sponsors, finding speakers, dealing with money & expenses, and all the details that go into making a rockin' user group.
And if you don't have a user group in your area, hopefully this episode will inspire you to take Cal Evans' advice and start one!
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We chatting with some PHP & HHVM internals folks to learn what's been going on in the world of internals.
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SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is an architecture that shifts our focus from one big monolithic web app to smaller connected web apps. We discuss what an SOA app looks like in the real world and how it affects our codebases, deployment & DevOps.
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Inspired by a panel discussion at Midwest PHP 2015, we discuss what barriers exist for women in the PHP community and what we can all do to remove gender bias.
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The PHP community has its fair-share of devs struggling with alcohol & weight loss and it doesn't help that there is a strong culture around alcohol consumption at nerd events. For some, the bottle is just a fun weekend with nerds. For others, it's a vice & deep struggle affecting them both mentally and physically.
We'll be discussing the alcoholic culture in the PHP community as well as our struggle with weight loss.
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Documentation can make or break a project but it's often completely overlooked until the very end. And if we don't think about how developers will interact with our project before writing our opening <?php tag, we could end up with a very ugly API.
We'll discuss some strategies we can take to improve the overall developer experience with "good" documentation and clean API's
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We've seen 2 alpha releases of PHP 7 so far and the first beta release became available this past Friday, July 10th. We might not put too much thought into what goes into each release of PHP so for this episode we take a closer look at the release management processes for PHP 7.
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So you have a 9-5 job but want to start your own business... where do you start? We discuss what realistic first-steps you'll need to take in order to transform yourself from a PHP employee to PHP entrepreneur.
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Inspired by a lively Open Spaces session at php|tek 2015, we discuss how PHP's ecosystem could be threatened by a not-so-obvious bus factor and what we can all do to keep things thriving.
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PSR-7 is the latest accepted member to the PHP FIG's standards library. We discuss what PSR-7 is, how it utilizes streams, immutability & middleware, and how it will affects you as a developer.
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We discuss an idea for a web app and identify ways to turn it into a real-life product on the web.
We start with describing the domain and the problems the app should solve. Then we identify the personas that will interact with the app. We discuss the features features the app should have to fix the problems and we sort all the features by priority. Finally we talk about timeline, deliverables and next steps.
The app we discuss will be launched to production by the next airing of this multi-part series of taking an idea to code.
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A special live mashup recording with Loosely Coupled from php[tek] in Chicago, IL. We talk #phptek, Open Source, and eat some PSR-7 cake.
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We discuss freelancing as a PHP developer, managing client expectations, niches, good customer service, project scope & scope creep, hourly rates vs value based pricing, and whether or not to run a SaaS.
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A short afterglow discussion about the 2015 F8 Facebook Developer Conference in San Francisco, CA & a look at the new Facebook PHP SDK and where it's headed.
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We discuss practical ways of dealing with legacy codebases and address the question of, "to rewrite or to refactor"? We also talk about how we should manage client expectations when working with a legacy codebase. And finally we discuss some general strategies for refactoring a codebase to good, clean, modern PHP.
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You don't need to be a C programmer in order to contribute to PHP internals. We'll be discussing how you can get involved with PHP internals, the GoPHP7-ext project and how you can help get PHP 7 ready for release.
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Part 2 of an on-going series on open source. We discuss a number of open source topics including what the expectations are for support of an open source project. We also discuss how to use SemVer to successfully maintain an open source package and what we can do when SemVer is not an option. And finally we take a look at licensing and discuss why we need to be concerned with it.
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A live recording from Midwest PHP in Minneapolis, MN. We talk about developer burn-out, the GoPHP7-ext project, why eval() is bad, the cons of the reflection class and announce the voting phase for an RFC for PHP7.
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We focus our discussion on two ideologies within the testing realm: test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD). We talk about how these two methodologies bring a unique angle to testing software and how we can use them in tandem in our own PHP projects.
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A live mashup of PHP Roundtable and PHP Town Hall at Sunshine PHP in Miami, Florida.
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Accessibility is an important and often overlooked aspect of web development. In this episode we'll discuss why web accessibility is so important and how we can make the web more accessible.
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ReactJS is not just another JavaScript framework. It's not a replacement for jQuery, Ember or Angular. But it's a library that's got one wild and crazy way to render the DOM using something called JSX. You'll hate it. Then you'll love it. Then you'll be an annoying fan-boy of it.
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With big security breaches becoming the norm these days, security is something we simply cannot ignore. In this discussion we'll ask the experts how we can become more responsible developers by learning about specific security threats we should be most concerned with.
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Part one of a multi-part series on open source. Today we discuss open source & code management with a version control system & explore the concept of git-flow.
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Taylor Otwell & Phil Sturgeon go head-to-head debating all the things.
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How the sausage is made. Taking a look at PHP's history and where it's going in the future.
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All about web API's: designing your API with RAML, authentication with OAuth and discussing the hypermedia-constraint (HATEOAS).
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We explore what functional programming looks like in PHP. We also touch on non-blocking, asynchronous, & event-driven concepts.
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A discussion that examines the zeitgeist of PHP. From elePHPants, to user groups, to PHP internals, to testing, to the awesome people in the community.
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Early September (tentative)
We discuss DocBlocks, PSR-5, Annotations, reflection, class metadata, automatic API documentation generation, and their future in PHP.
Mid-September (tentative)
We talk about the Drupal and its ecosystem.
Late September (tentative)
There have been lots of big changes happening with the PHP-FIG. Today we chat with a number of figgies to get the inside scoop on what has changed.
Late September (tentative)
What is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and how does it affect us PHP devs?
Early October (tentative)
We take website that wasn't designed with accessibility in mind and discuss what steps we need to take in order to make it more accessible.
Mid-October (tentative)
Mid-October (tentative)
Picking a date & time should be easy, but it's supposedly one of the hardest things in programming. We talk about why this is the case.
Late October (tentative)
The PHP community was buzzing about middleware a few years ago, but where is the current state of middleware in the PHP community today? Today we talk all about middleware; the role it plays today and it's future in PHP.
Mid-November (tentative)
Investing in startups is a risky business, but the payout can make it all worth the risk. As developers, we have more investment options than just shelling out cash. If you've ever been burned by someone offering you equity in a company in exchange for your PHP work, this episode is for you. Today we chat with startup investors to help us make the right decisions when investing in startups as developers.
