Freek.dev

After writing a couple small programs in Hack I've realized that it's not types themselves that make writing Hack enjoyable: it's the tight feedback loop Hack creates between the machine and myself. Integrating the Hack type checker into my editor means that my entire codebase is analyzed in a split second as soon as I save a file. This immediately surfaces any dumb, or subtle mistakes I made. I find myself writing code fearlessly: when I forget what a function returns, I just write code that calls it with what I think it returns. If I'm wrong, the type checker will tell me immediately. I can fix it quickly, and move on.

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Lumen is Laravel, stripped down for speed. It doesn't bother with views and sessions and other consumer-facing conveniences--it's optimized for speedy, trim, microservices. Try it out. And check out the docs, too, for a ton of more information about how to use Lumen.

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Over at the Fortrabbit blog you'll find a great list containing various influencers of the PHP ecosystem.

... we have to have an eye on future trends. So we are monitoring what’s going on in the open source PHP world. It’s fun watching all those interesting projects out there. But it’s not about technology only. You’ll need to know about the people driving the projects to understand what’s going on. What are the visible, vocal & visionary PHPeople up to?

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The PHP UK Conference had a great schedule this year. Most sessions were recorded and are now available on YouTube. Happy viewing!

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... it’s important to remember that API design isn’t strictly about the practical implications on client and server software. The audience for an API is the developer who is going to consume it. Per the "principle of least astonishment," developers will have an easier time learning and understanding an API if it follows the same conventions as other APIs they’re familiar with.

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A very nice post by Christopher Pitt about generators and how to use them to run code asynchronous.

https://medium.com/%2540assertchris/co-operative-php-multitasking-ce4ef52858a0

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In PHP, variable allocation is really easy, you don’t really need to know how memory is managed to use the language. But if you want to be a good programmer, you NEED to know what happens when you write “$var = 10;”

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Here's another cool piece of code by Matthias Verraes:

function it($m,$p){echo ($p?'✔︎':'✘')." It $m\n"; if(!$p){$GLOBALS['f']=1;}}function done(){if(@$GLOBALS['f'])die(1);}

https://gist.github.com/mathiasverraes/9046427

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Having documentation on your API is highly beneficial. If it is well written you're likely going to receive less questions by consumers of your API about how it works.

Aglio is a nice tool that I've been using to generate API documentation. In goes the Markdown, out comes the beautiful documentation.

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As you may know, the Scalar Type Wars are over. It has been decided that we will have scalar type hints in PHP7.

Here's a nice short write up on the three related accepted RFC's by Er Galvao Abbott.

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Socialite is a first party package that was introduced together with Laravel 5. It aims to provide a very convenient way to authenticate with OAuth providers. Natively it supports Facebook, Twitter, Google, GitHub and Bitbucket.

DraperStudio and Andy Wendt made a whole bunch of other Socialite providers.

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The `yield` keyword is used by generators, which provide a simple way to implement iterators without having to create a class that implements the `Iterator` interface. A generator allows you to write code that iterates over a set of data without needing to build an array in memory that is returned at the end.

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On the internals mailing list Anthony Ferrara posted a plea for unity on scalar types. If you want to know why it's so difficult to add scalar type hints to PHP, you should read it.

Scalar types are a hard problem. Not technically, but politically, because so many people use PHP in different ways. And everyone thinks their way is "the one true way".

The RFC needs a 2/3 majority to pass. The yes-camp currently has 67%. Personally I really hope this proposal will get accepted.

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Excellent post by Rafael Dohms on the The League Of Extraordinary packages.

“The League of Extraordinary Packages” is what I have dubbed a collective of composer packages. Its essentially a group of developers who have gathered under a single flag (or in this case a vendor name) and set standards for the packages that live there.

...

So these are a few reasons I like this effort:

• Imposed Quality, Curated List ...
• Reduced author fragility ...
• Extended reach ...
• Reduced duplication ...

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Matthew Setter went to the rabbi.

I don’t have a specific conference in mind, but I’ve given myself the next 12 months. I think that’s a practical and realistic amount of time, yet still short enough to not lose sight of.

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A list of interesting conference talks and videos on PHP.

https://github.com/phptodayorg/php-must-watch

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The accepted solution thus far has been to install newer versions of PHP alongside Apple’s version using Homebrew or MacPorts. This would likely require you to compile the MCrypt extension manually. I also found that Homebrew could leave your system in disarray if things went wrong (more than once I had to do a complete restore because of this).

However, there’s another method I came across while research some non-related issues: install the latest version of PHP from a binary that includes the MCrypt extension. It will not bork up your system if you want to remove it, either.

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The next major release of PHP, version 7, is going to be an awesome release. Not only will performance be greatly improved, there probably will be lots of nice changes to the language.

The procedure on how PHP gets changed is easily readable and well documented. In short it comes down to this:

• Proposed changes are submitted on the PHP Wiki.
• There is a RFC (Request for comments) phase in which key members of the community and contributors can discuss the change.
• After this round of discussion, which lasts a minimum of two weeks, they can vote if the proposed change gets implemented in a next version of the language.

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Michael Maclean demonstrates how a 2100% performance gain can be achieved when rendering a Mandelbrot fractal using Recki-CT, a PHP compiler written in PHP.

Recently, Anthony Ferrara (known throughout the Internet and beyond as @ircmaxell) and Joe Watkins (similarly well-known as @krakjoe) have been working on a new set of toys for solving this problem while staying on the “standard” PHP runtime. Recki-CT is a set of tools that implement a PHP compiler, in PHP. While this might you think of things like PyPy, which implements a Python virtual machine in Python, this is not Recki’s goal – it doesn’t provide a VM, so it can’t run PHP by itself. However, it can parse PHP code and generate other code from it.

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