The Digital Wild West - Part Two
Regulation?The problem has been framed in part one, the programming industry, including PHP,  mostly operates in an unregulated environment, resulting in unpredictable skill levels, lack of oversight, and potential for severe consequences. This environment...
1 week ago
The Digital Wild West - Part one
1. Unpredictable IndustryHave you ever wondered why the industry of PHP is so unpredictable when it comes to the knowledge base of a programmer? This has been tickling my gray cells, few of which I have, for years. Additionally, this is also true for...
2 weeks ago
I am an amateur
After the publication of my last blog post, there was quite a hoohah from within the PHP community. I think that some mistakes and issues need to be addressed. I got into programming because of the awesome power available at your fingertips, to me it’s...
1 month ago
My Journey of Relearning Laravel (edited)
Currently, I’m in the process of switching back to Laravel after spending many years becoming a specialist and writing a book about Symfony. In the past year or so I have noticed the gap between Symfony and Laravel grow wider, companies choosing Laravel...
1 month ago
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Lately, for some reason, I've been increasingly noticing the disconnect between a company’s rhetoric and reality. Perhaps, over the course of 9 years in the IT industry, I’ve become more attuned to filtering out the hype and bullshit. Many companies...
1 month ago
How and Why I Use Symfony Asset Mapper (importmap) Over Encore
Symfony provides powerful tools for asset management, and among these tools are the Asset Mapper (importmap) and Symfony Encore. While both have their strengths, there are compelling reasons to choose Asset Mapper over Encore, particularly for projects...
4 months ago
The Non-tech Problems Facing Tech Teams
Through my experience with various companies' tech teams over the years, I've observed a recurring pattern of non-technical issues that affect them. Lack of CommunicationIronically, the very people that build these complex communications platforms struggle...
6 months ago
CIO's Guide to AI-Driven Cost Reduction: Preparing Your Development Team
Feeling the squeeze? First COVID-19 related costs, then war on the European continent leading to energy prices soaring in turn making operational costs soar and now a slump in slow markets. Not to mention the state of the labor market, trying to find...
6 months ago
Developers Holding Your App Hostage? Want To Fire Them, But Can’t? How to Break Free.
Are you frustrated by how slow, problematic and stressful delivering a new feature for your application has become? You may even think that this is a normal state of affairs, that there is supposed to be a constant and grinding battle between management...
6 months ago
The Shift
In recent years, applications have become bloated and extremely complex. With the advent of Javascript frontend frameworks like React and Vue, we have essentially doubled or tripled the workload, by creating essentially two or more isolated systems for...
7 months ago
Navigating the Java Upgrade: A Business Owner's Guide to Modernisation
You have a business running on a legacy Java system and you need to upgrade. A bunch of questions come to mind: What is a project upgrade?What’s the upgrade process? How much will it cost?How long will it take?How can we start? What is a project upgrade?A...
7 months ago
An approach to instant Java upgrades
A very good friend of mine, Tomas Votruba created Rector, a command line tool for instant upgrades and automated refactoring in PHP. About three years ago, I mentioned creating the same tool for Java, hypothesizing that it would be incredibly lucrative...
7 months ago
What are coding standards and how can we use them?
You may have heard of a bunch of terms thrown around like, static analysis, Rector, Easy Coding Standards and Phpstan. But what are they, what do they mean and how can we use them?  Firstly, static analysis, refers to the process of analysing source...
7 months ago
Why I use ArrayCollections over arrays?
We all should know by now that array are terrible for typing we can create a single array containing, an object, string, int and boolean, like so: $array = [ new Quote(quote: 'That\'s all any of us are: amateurs. we don\'t live long enough to be...
7 months ago
My Journey Into The World of Tech
Let's be honest for a moment. I don't mean this as a cliche statement to then go on to express something that, will either make me look good, or to emphasise a point. I mean it, let's be genuinely honest, I got into this industry based on lies, not something...
7 months ago
What the HTMX!
No, HTMX is not a dirty version of HTML. Once upon a time, while down the youtube tech rabbit hole, I came across a video by Maximilian Schwarzmüller, referring to some dark and disturbing magic called htmx that claimed to reduce if not remove your requirement...
7 months ago
How I use the doctrine ORM QueryBuilder
When I started out using Symfony I was frustrated at the lack of instruction on how to achieve an objective, unfortunately for the most part this is still true, I love Symfony but I do feel like it's now lagging behind in instruction and event features...
8 months ago
The Utter Bullshit of Management Methodologies
All of us have probably been in that rather painful situation in a call "Do you have any questions or anything to add?" asks the Scrum Master in earnest, hoping that this time someone, anyone might have something constructive to contribute, at this point...
9 months ago
PHP Legacy code: Management edition
Do you have, or work for company that has a legacy codebase, if you have one or more of the following then, my condolences, you do: PHP version 5.3 to 7.0  Lack of documentation and/or application knowledgeStruggle to keep the application alive and/or...
1 year ago
Artificial Intelligence: Can We Regulate Pandora's Box?
In the midst of cries from the founding fathers of artificial intelligence, warning us all of the imminent and potentially apocalyptic dangers of this unprecedented technology.The architects predict the extinction of the human race if the progress of...
1 year ago