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:

In today’s video, we’re going to explore the concepts of closures in JavaScript and PHP. During this quick exploration, we’ll talk a little bit about variable scope and the difference between scoping in JS and PHP. Check out the video:

The brain is a muscle, and as all muscles, it needs regular exercise to keep sharp. Or at least that’s what the old adage says. This is a post that I’ve been meaning to write for a long time now, but never got around to (until now that is). Sparked by a twitter conversation with Mr Grumpy himself (Chris Hartjes), I decided that the time was right for it. So, here’s my method for staying sharp and exercising my brain…

This week’s Programming With Anthony video is up! In it, we discuss the foundations of Boolean Logic and introduce some very interesting tools for analyzing logical constructs (including Truth Tables and De Morgan’s Laws). So without any further ado:

Brandon Savage has recently posted two blog posts portraying his opinion that using private visibility on class methods can be considered harmful in a lot of situations. While I understand the point he is trying to make, I can’t say that I agree with it. I do like private visibility and think that it’s actually under-used in a lot of software. But it’s not because I think Brandon is wrong…

I’ve been playing around with tempting engines a lot lately. For a recent project, I needed the ability to re-use the same template set in both JS and PHP (coupled with the History API, providing seamless dynamic behavior, yet still having raw content pages). Realistically today, there’s only one choice for that sort of requirement: Mustache. I’ve learned a lot while playing with Mustache, and it’s really changed my entire viewpoint on presentation layer construction.

The third video to my Programming With Anthony series is up! In this video, I talk about variables in PHP and how they work under the hood. I explain the difference between variable references and object references, along with the semantics of each. Give it a watch!

So, for the past few days I’ve been talking about a secret project that I’ve been working on. Well, today I’m pleased to announce the project. I’ve been working on starting a series of YouTube videos about programming. The first of these videos is about Paradigms (Procedural, OOP, Functional). Plenty of future ones are planned, but the topics, order and even if they happen is completely up to you! I want your feedback on the concept. Is it something worth pursuing? Any topics you’d like to see? Any other comments about the concept? You can reply to this post, or to the video itself. So, without further adue, here’s the video:

Last weekend I was at the True North PHP conference in Toronto, Canada. Aside from being an incredible experience (really, it was an incredible conference, huge props to Chris Hartjes (@grmpyprogrammer) and Peter Meth (@mrpmeth)), it was an inspiration. I was particularly inspired by both of the keynote speakers. They both really took really unique spins on programming and how the culture of open source inspires, enables and empowers programmers to do cool and important things. The problem with all of this is that I hate the term programmer. I think it unfairly paints a picture of what we do. Let me elaborate.

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.