This afternoon, I gave another talk at TrueNorth PHP. The talk is a version of a previous talk that I gave on Object Oriented Design. I’ve changed it significantly, so here are the slides.

This morning, I gave a talk at TrueNorth PHP. The talk was aimed at explaining the basics of Cryptography as needed for the average developer. It is intended to give a high level understanding of cryptography and cryptographic techniques. So, with no further adue, here’s the slides:

Last week, I was at PHP North West. The conference was incredible to say the least. One of the best I’ve been to in a very long time. But to the point of this post, I did an unconference talk about password hashing in PHP. Since I had my camera with me, I also took video of it. So included in this post is both the slides from the talk, and the video of the talk. So, with no further adue:

Well, I know it’s been a while since my last post here. I’ve been keeping busy (but also working on some cool stuff for you all, when the time is right). I figured that it was worth while pointing out a few upcoming talks that I’m going to be giving and conferences that I’ll be attending.

In recent months, a number of new frameworks have cropped up for PHP as PECL extensions (Including YAF and PhalconPHP). They promise to provide huge performance gains and lower resource usage for PHP applications. On the surface, they appear to be incredible tools for improving development. But they aren’t all they are cracked up to be. In fact, I would argue that they are actually not necessary at all.

Yesterday, I got in an interesting conversation on twitter about object scopes and what constitutes a global scope. The discussion started around a piece of code that I stumbled upon from Fuel 2.0. I am a firm believer that service containers are not a form of Dependency Injection, and are only slightly better than global variables. That led me to make a few comments that elicited a reply from two Fuel developers. That led to a rather interesting debate that just couldn’t fit into 140 characters… So I’m going to go into topics that are tightly related: variable scoping and service locators.

I had the pleasure of attending the North East PHP conference this weekend. I’ve attended a lot of conferences over the years, but I found this one to be one of the most enjoyable ones that I’ve ever attended. On my drive home (4.5 hours in a car gives you a lot of time to think), I was thinking about what made it such an enjoyable time. Here’s what I’ve come up with goes into making a good conference.

Or anyone else for that matter. Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of feedback about my posts that I’m suggesting things that are going to get less experienced developers into a lot of trouble. Or that people are going to use my posts as justification for bad practices. Or that people are going to cause major issues by putting experimental concepts into production. My initial response is “That’s their problem.”

Today’s post is in response to an article that I read yesterday entitled They Write The Right Stuff. It’s a very interesting and insightful look into one of the most complex and critical pieces of software ever produced (also one of the most expensive). I think we can learn a lot from what they are doing, but I also think we should avoid copying what they are doing. The point that’s missed is practicality.

Every developer who studies computer science (and most who haven’t) has heard the phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out“ before. It’s such a logical concept that it’s almost beyond refuting. Almost. While the phrase still definitely holds true for some situations, it doesn’t hold for most. How can such a logical and straight forward saying lead us down the wrong path?