The PHP Roundtable

We record live from Lone Star PHP 2016 in Dallas, TX. We discuss what DI Containers aren't, tradeoffs to making things easy, how to improve your dev skills, repercussions of depending on Composer, PHP 7.1 features and we give away a white Confoo elePHPant.

The technologies that run the web are constantly changing. We discuss strategies for staying on top of the constant flux with continuous learning throughout your career, having mentors, engaging regularly with your peers, contributing to open source projects, voracious reading, and travel to programming events.

The PHP-FIG has really helped the PHP community get onboard the collaboration train with really great standards like the PSR-4 autoloading standard and the PSR-7 HTTP message interfaces. We discuss PSR-0 through PSR-13 and the process they go through to become standards. We also discuss where the FIG came from and the possible big changes coming to the organization soon.

Traditional relational databases like MySQL or Postgres are really good at providing many solutions to the problem of persisting state. But these types of database are really horrible at querying highly connected models in an efficient way. Graph databases like Neo4j and OrientDB excel at highly connected data. In fact, graph technologies are the backbone of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. We discuss how to think about our data using the graph model and what tools we can use in our PHP projects to interface with them. We also discuss the considerations we'll need to make when deciding whether or not to use a graph database in our next project.

We get an update on status of the project we discussed in part 1 and discuss next steps to take our dance event management app idea to production.

New features of PHP get added via the request for comments process. We chatting with a few RFC authors about what features they are proposing for the next major version of PHP.

Object-relational mapping (ORM) tools are a great way to model relational databases in your codebase. We discuss the benefits that ORM tools can add to our apps, some problems with the ORM model and where the PHP community seems to be heading when it comes to persisting data. We'll also discuss the opposing active record & data mapper paradigms.

We bring room 11 chat room from Stack Overflow to the Roundtable. We discuss security, PSR-6, Magic the Gathering, PHP 7 and kittens.

Immutability plays a huge role in functional programming and many languages support immutability directly; like the readonly keyword in C#. It is possible to create immutable objects in PHP, but the language lacks inherent immutable features for scalar variables and class properties. We discuss how to bring functional programming concepts to PHP and brainstorm some features that could possibly be added to future versions of PHP to offer better immutability support.

Believe it or not, there's a lot more to debugging your PHP code than var_dump()'ing all the things. We discuss how to use debugging tools to help us comprehensively debug our codebase.

With a new design pattern coming out every week it can be easy to get caught up in all the hype. If you frequently try to implement the latest-and-greatest design pattern and feel constantly paralyzed by the thought, "I know I'm doing this wrong," this episode is for you. We discuss how "not seeing the forest for the trees" might be a good thing as we try to narrow our focus in order to write better code without thinking of patterns first.

User groups are core to the strength of the PHP community. We discuss what it takes to run a solid user group in your area; finding food & venue sponsors, finding speakers, dealing with money & expenses, and all the details that go into making a rockin' user group. And if you don't have a user group in your area, hopefully this episode will inspire you to take Cal Evans' advice and start one!

We chatting with some PHP & HHVM internals folks to learn what's been going on in the world of internals.

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is an architecture that shifts our focus from one big monolithic web app to smaller connected web apps. We discuss what an SOA app looks like in the real world and how it affects our codebases, deployment & DevOps.

Inspired by a panel discussion at Midwest PHP 2015, we discuss what barriers exist for women in the PHP community and what we can all do to remove gender bias.

The PHP community has its fair-share of devs struggling with alcohol & weight loss and it doesn't help that there is a strong culture around alcohol consumption at nerd events. For some, the bottle is just a fun weekend with nerds. For others, it's a vice & deep struggle affecting them both mentally and physically. We'll be discussing the alcoholic culture in the PHP community as well as our struggle with weight loss.

A live recording from Laracon US in Louisville, Kentucky.

Documentation can make or break a project but it's often completely overlooked until the very end. And if we don't think about how developers will interact with our project before writing our opening php tag, we could end up with a very ugly API. We'll discuss some strategies we can take to improve the overall developer experience with "good" documentation and clean API's

We've seen 2 alpha releases of PHP 7 so far and the first beta release became available this past Friday, July 10th. We might not put too much thought into what goes into each release of PHP so for this episode we take a closer look at the release management processes for PHP 7.

So you have a 9-5 job but want to start your own business... where do you start? We discuss what realistic first-steps you'll need to take in order to transform yourself from a PHP employee to PHP entrepreneur.

Inspired by a lively Open Spaces session at php|tek 2015, we discuss how PHP's ecosystem could be threatened by a not-so-obvious bus factor and what we can all do to keep things thriving.

PSR-7 is the latest accepted member to the PHP FIG's standards library. We discuss what PSR-7 is, how it utilizes streams, immutability & middleware, and how it will affects you as a developer.

We discuss an idea for a web app and identify ways to turn it into a real-life product on the web. We start with describing the domain and the problems the app should solve. Then we identify the personas that will interact with the app. We discuss the features features the app should have to fix the problems and we sort all the features by priority. Finally we talk about timeline, deliverables and next steps. The app we discuss will be launched to production by the next airing of this multi-part series of taking an idea to code.

A special live mashup recording with Loosely Coupled from php[tek] in Chicago, IL. We talk #phptek, Open Source, and eat some PSR-7 cake.

We discuss freelancing as a PHP developer, managing client expectations, niches, good customer service, project scope & scope creep, hourly rates vs value based pricing, and whether or not to run a SaaS.

A short afterglow discussion about the 2015 F8 Facebook Developer Conference in San Francisco, CA & a look at the new Facebook PHP SDK and where it's headed.

We discuss practical ways of dealing with legacy codebases and address the question of, "to rewrite or to refactor"? We also talk about how we should manage client expectations when working with a legacy codebase. And finally we discuss some general strategies for refactoring a codebase to good, clean, modern PHP.

You don't need to be a C programmer in order to contribute to PHP internals. We'll be discussing how you can get involved with PHP internals, the GoPHP7-ext project and how you can help get PHP 7 ready for release.

Part 2 of an on-going series on open source. We discuss a number of open source topics including what the expectations are for support of an open source project. We also discuss how to use SemVer to successfully maintain an open source package and what we can do when SemVer is not an option. And finally we take a look at licensing and discuss why we need to be concerned with it.

A live recording from Midwest PHP in Minneapolis, MN. We talk about developer burn-out, the GoPHP7-ext project, why eval() is bad, the cons of the reflection class and announce the voting phase for an RFC for PHP7.

We focus our discussion on two ideologies within the testing realm: test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD). We talk about how these two methodologies bring a unique angle to testing software and how we can use them in tandem in our own PHP projects.

A live mashup of PHP Roundtable and PHP Town Hall at Sunshine PHP in Miami, Florida.

Accessibility is an important and often overlooked aspect of web development. In this episode we'll discuss why web accessibility is so important and how we can make the web more accessible.

ReactJS is not just another JavaScript framework. It's not a replacement for jQuery, Ember or Angular. But it's a library that's got one wild and crazy way to render the DOM using something called JSX. You'll hate it. Then you'll love it. Then you'll be an annoying fan-boy of it.

With big security breaches becoming the norm these days, security is something we simply cannot ignore. In this discussion we'll ask the experts how we can become more responsible developers by learning about specific security threats we should be most concerned with.

Discussing domain-driven design concepts in PHP.

Part one of a multi-part series on open source. Today we discuss open source & code management with a version control system & explore the concept of git-flow.

Taylor Otwell & Phil Sturgeon go head-to-head debating all the things.

How the sausage is made. Taking a look at PHP's history and where it's going in the future.

All about web API's: designing your API with RAML, authentication with OAuth and discussing the hypermedia-constraint (HATEOAS).

Drunken chatter from #WurstCon Chicago 2014.

We explore what functional programming looks like in PHP. We also touch on non-blocking, asynchronous, & event-driven concepts.

A discussion that examines the zeitgeist of PHP. From elePHPants, to user groups, to PHP internals, to testing, to the awesome people in the community.