Blog
How to write files to disk with PHP
Saving files to disk is a pretty simple task in PHP with file_put_contents(). Here's how to write a string to a file: $string = 'I AM STRING!!'; file_put_contents('/path/to/destination', $string); It is generally good practice to only do with when you [...]
Command line all the things!
The start of 2014 has been an exercise in going back to basics for me. I've been re-evaluating my workflows when hacking and attempting to streamline as much as humanly possible. This has resulted in a ton of new aliases [...]
How to use try/catch statements in PHP. Oh, and finally too!
I do a lot of coding in Python and one thing that I really love is the mindset of asking for forgiveness instead of permission. What's this mean? It means that instead of sanity checking every little thing, just handling [...]
Gravatar as an identicon generation service
If you're not already aware, Gravatar is a free service that allows you to couple an image to your email address which can then be carried around the Internet with you. It's great for site owners because then you don't [...]
Your stack is outdated
I've been noticing a pattern with most of my peers (yes I said most), they expect their users to be running the latest and greatest version of their favorite "modern" browser and all the while their server stack is collecting [...]
How to use switch/case statements in PHP
switch/case statements are one of my favorite anti-patterns not because I prefer to write spaghetti code but because they can make if/elseif blocks look a ton cleaner. Why would it be considered an anti-pattern? Because it could easily be abused [...]
Improve performance by reusing PHP objects
I've been doing a ton of optimizations on one of my main sites and one thing that I've been doing more and more is trying to reuse objects whenever possible. What's this entail? All it takes is creating a static [...]
How I saw the test-driven light
Aside from dealing with financial transactions, I've generally avoided test-driven development as part of my day to day workflow. Why? The usual reasons, but mostly because I didn't want to incur the overhead of additional development. As a single founder [...]
PHP 5.5 syntax highlighting for Vim
Now that I'm using PHP 5.5 I'm finding that my Vim syntax highlighting is a bit off. After some digging around I found a syntax file that was updated to PHP 5.5 RC1 but hasn't been updated since. In true [...]
Upgrade from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.5 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Recently I made the decision to stop living in the past and start living in the present by using the latest stable release of PHP, version 5.5.8. Unfortunately on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (I always run LTS releases on my servers) [...]