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 …

PHP 8.4: Release Date and Features, August 2024

PHP 8.3 to PHP 8.4 update thumbnail

In my previous post for the upcoming PHP 8.4 release, I addressed the expecting changes. Just a few days after the post, PHP announced Property Hooks – a feature that gives me mixed feelings. Today – a few months before the final release – I want to give a second overview to PHP 8.4. The … read more …

Laminas Framework Series: Middleware Deep Dive

Laminas Framework Middleware

The 5th post in the Laminas Framework series is about having a closer look into the middleware concept in Mezzio, a fast, flexible and modern web framework for Laminas. In Mezzio, each request has an associated request handler which can get wrapped by middlewares. The idea of middleware is therefore a key concept in the … read more …

Enum Best Practices in PHP 8.3

Enums in PHP

Enumerations (short: enums) were added in version 8.1 in 2021. In the journey of becoming a modern and object oriented programming language, enums in PHP were a cornerstone of writing cleaner, stricter and robust code. In this blog post, I want to address my experience so far with enums and give some advices, after having … read more …