Discover a wide range of blog articles covering PHP development, coding best practices, and software engineering insights.
Stay up to date with practical guides, expert advice, and real-world solutions designed to enhance your programming skills and streamline your workflow.
Learn more about my random thoughts about software engineering and tech.
Small teams feel the same phishing pressure as big ones. The difference is time and headcount – especially for SMBs if you don’t have a provider. You need a DMARC stack that is simple to deploy, safe to operate, and strict enough to block abuse. This guide takes a nerdy look at what matters and … read more …
For more than a decade, PHP developers have debated one question: Should PHP have generics? I try to answer this question in my book. Generics are a cornerstone feature in many languages – from Java and C# to TypeScript. They allow developers to write reusable, type-safe code without endless duplication. Yet in PHP, the road … read more …
If you have ever encountered a vague but catastrophic error like this: … while working in a Symfony project using Doctrine and the Symfony serializer, you are not alone 🙂 This post walks you through a real-world debugging journey that ended up pinpointing a subtle but devastating issue: Symfony’s default serializer uses Doctrine metadata – … read more …
There is currently a PHP RFC in voting that seems to make it into PHP 8.5: Pipe Operators. In a third try, the pipe operator will most likely find its way natively to PHP. In this blog post, I want to address the upcoming new operator, the meaning of piping in general and its history … read more …
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 …