Why Self-Replicating Code (Quines) in PHP Is a Security Red Flag

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 …

PHP 8.5: Release Date and Features, April 2025

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 …

Why State of PHP 2024 is all about Laravel

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 …

Recap PHP Property Hooks in 2025

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 …

Dependency Injection with PHP 8.4’s Lazy Objects

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 …

DMARC: From Theory to Cloud Service – Part 1

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 …

Item-Based Collaborative Filtering

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 …

A Week of Work

A Week of Work

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 …

AI will not replace Software Engineers

Abstract Artificial Intelligence (AI) thumbnail

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 …