There’s been a viral video that’s been circulating the internet recently called Wealth Inequality In America. It’s actually been published for quite some time, but it’s crossed my plane of vision a few times in the past few days. While I don’t believe that the content is wrong (in fact, it is actually quite right), I believe that the point the video makes and how it makes it are both misleading. The video tends to imply some nefarious plot to keep the poor down. But in reality, all it is showing is the natural tendency for any system of sufficient complexity to trend towards having a power-law distribution.

About three months ago I decided to start shooting videos teaching programming concepts to put on YouTube. When I first started it, I didn’t think it would take off. In fact, I thought it’d be just another failed attempt at trying something new. But three months, 11 videos, nearly 700 subscribers, over 17,000 views and 1.5 man-months of viewership later, I can’t really complain. I’ve missed a few videos over the past few weeks, and missed another one today. And I feel that you deserve to know why.

Over the past 3 or 4 days there’s been a huge upturn on Twitter and in the community bashing Web and PHP Magazine for giving away T-Shirts (and tweeting a photo) with a double-entendre at PHPUK. A lot of banter going back and forth from those like Cal Evans who went so far as to pledge never to go to another conference sponsored by the magazine, to Stefan Koopmanschap who basically thinks it’s no big deal. (note: these are my interpretations from their posts). I think the whole thing has grown WAY out of proportion…

Today we are joined by open source contributor Larry Garfield. Larry introduces us to design patterns through his own unique style: Cooking With Crell. He introduces the concept of Design Patterns, goes through a few basic patterns and closes out with some pretty solid justification for why we should care. Check it out:

There’s been a bit of noise in the past week about the proper way to prevent Cross-Site-Request-Forgery (CSRF) attacks. It seemed to have started with this post. There’s been discussion in the comments, and on Twitter about it, and there seems to be several opposing viewpoints on the matter. I want to start off by saying that I agree completely with the post in question. But I figured I’d write a post to explain WHY I agree with it.

Today, I’m doing a talk at PHP Benelux 13 on Password Storage and Attacking in PHP. Here are the slides for that talk, as well as the accompanying GitHub repo that I use throughout the talk. When the videos are posted, I’ll make a followup post that links to it. Without rambling on further, click through for the links!

The Mediator Pattern is an extremely flexible and useful tool to help decouple your code and provide added flexibility in your applications. We’ll explore the basic concept of a Mediator, some places you’ve used it and some things that you can do to improve upon the basic concept. Check out the video:

I first came across the concept of a Promise about 3 years ago. At the time I was working with jQuery and was rather put off by the concept. It wasn’t that it wasn’t useful, I just didn’t understand it. Then, about a year ago the concept finally “clicked”… I refactored some existing applications and the reduction in code and simplicity of it all was breathtaking. But I never really appreciated the true power until I used them in PHP…

Today’s Programming With Anthony video focuses on the concept of Iterators. We’ll look at the abstraction that they represent, how they can be used and some of the benefits of using them. When used correctly, Iterators can lead to very efficient, flexible and clean code. Check out the video:

This week, we’re going to talk about the topic of Dependency Injection in Object oriented code (specifically PHP). You don’t need a fancy container to do it, it’s actually quite simple to do manually! Check out the video: