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A program that prints its own source code? That’s clever. Yes – until it shows up in your production environment. Welcome to the world of Quines (in PHP): self-replicating code that outputs its own source without reading its own file. A fascinating programming challenge in theory. A potential security nightmare in practice. In this post, … read more …
As of April 2025, PHP 8.5 is in active development, with its release scheduled for November 2025. This upcoming version introduces several enhancements aimed at improving developer experience and language capabilities. Although not all features are voted or implemented yet, I would like to give an overview to the current situation, as I did last … read more …
The core of PHP, one of the most widely deployed backend technologies, has undergone a comprehensive security audit in 2025. Commissioned and funded by independent external parties, this audit was conducted by an independent security company. Over the course of 57 days, the company reviewed critical components of the PHP interpreter (php-src) in preparation for the … read more …
Earlier this month, State of PHP 2024 was published by JetBrains. I am a regular reader of JetBrains blog since I think the people behind the creators of tools like PHPStorm and other useful developer tools are always worth reading. But the latest State of PHP post, was more, well, very Laravel-heavy. Let me explain … read more …
Last year in April, I wrote about the Property Hooks RFC added to PHP 8.4 and my thoughts about it. The blog post appeared one day after the RFC was accepted and that is why the post was more theoretical. Now, almost two month after release, I want to address this topic again and want … read more …
PHP 8.4 is out now for approximately 2 month and there are a lot of new features – including Lazy Objects. One significant new feature is “Lazy Objects”, which is described as follows: A lazy object is an object whose initialization is deferred until its state is observed or modified. The past few weeks, I … read more …
The new year starts with some fresh ideas to strengthen IT Security and the awareness of digital communication. The last few weeks, I focused on email security in general – theory such as DMARC, SPF and DKIM – but also implementation details in PHP. I also created a video on YouTube, my first ever. Please … read more …
Back in 2017, during my Master’s Thesis, I ran this blog in german. Time flies and fast forward to today, I switched to english language very long time ago. For the thesis, I was researching about recommendation systems and Item-Based Collaborative Filtering, among others. My research results were published on this blog, but in German. … read more …
I was looking for the topics of this weeks blog but it seems like the PHP community is still in the summer hole. Sure, PHP 8.4 is still in the making and is awaited for November this year, but it is feature freezed and the already introduced features get a stable implementation now. So nothing … read more …
Today, I would like to address a topic that affects us all in some way: is AI going to replace software engineers? This is not just a fear I read and hear from different actors of the tech industry. For instance, in March 2024, NVIDIA CEO Jen Sen Huang said kids should stop learning programming … read more …