Many people teach design patterns as a fundamental step to Object Oriented Programming. They are so universally seen as important that almost every single conference that I have been to has had at least one talk about them. They are quite often used as interview questions to test a candidate’s OOP knowledge. However, just like inheritance, they are not needed for OOP. And just like inheritance, they are a distraction rather than a foundation. Instead of focusing on patterns, I suggest focusing on learning about abstraction and communication. Why? Let’s talk it out…

For the past several months I have been struggling to figure out what I want the next step in my career to be. I am still trying to figure the details out, but I had an important revelation last night. I want to share that revelation with you.

Lately I’ve been playing around with some functional languages and concepts. I have found that some of these concepts are directly applicable in the OOP code that I’ve been writing. One of those concepts that I think is worth talking about is the Monad. This is something that every functional developer tries to write a tutorial on, because it’s such a cool but hard to grasp concept. This post is not really going to be a Monad tutorial per se, but more of a post about bringing the general concept to OOP, and what that looks like.

Yes, you read that right. If your project aims to provide backwards compatibility as a primary goal, you’re a sucker. Tons of popular software projects from PHP to Microsoft Windows have stated goals of providing Backwards Compatibility between releases. And yes, I am here to say that they are doing it wrong.

Today, I did a talk at The Dutch PHP Conference 2013 on how PHP works under the hood. Click through for the slides!

In the April issue of the PHPArch magazine (also published on her blog), Elizabeth Tucker Long wrote a really interesting editorial piece coining a concept she called Security-Driven-Development. She (quite correctly) identified a problem in the current development community where security has become an after-thought (if it’s thought of at all). This isn’t a new concept, in fact it’s a concept that I and many others have been preaching for quite a while now. However I’ve been coming to realize that I’ve had it wrong the whole time. And I think the entire industry is getting it wrong today.

A few days ago, I posted a video about how to become a better developer. There were a few interesting comments made, but one in particular from the Reddit thread ( http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/... ) peaked my interest. So I decided to do a reply. Check it out:

In today’s episode, I talk a little bit about what it takes to become a better developer. Nobody will ever expect you to know everything, but you better know how to find it…

I’m trying out a new format with this video. Less scripted, more free-form, and with less visuals. This is not going to replace the other format (which I’m still working on), but instead compliment it from time to time. Let me know what you think in the comments below! Check it out:

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:

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…