The PHP Roundtable

PHP is known for running really bad code really well. But it has a dirty little secret: deep within its code is a hidden "stack bomb". You can cause PHP to completely crash with just a few lines of code. Today we discuss why this happens and what we can do to fix the issue.

In an industry like software engineering where it seems like there's always something else to learn, it's easy to come down with a case of imposter syndrome. We chat about imposter syndrome's impact on the PHP community and contrast it with the Dunning-Kruger effect.

After years of resisting, SammyK finally drank the Docker Kool-Aid for his everyday client work. We talk about his transition from Vagrant to Docker and some bumps he hit along the way.

Adding tests to php-src is a great way to get involved with PHP internals. Don't know how to get started? You're in luck. TestFest 2017 is going to be a thing in September. User groups and individuals around the world are going to organize to learn how to add tests to PHP and become official internals contributors. It has been 7 years since the last TestFest in 2010. We chat about how to get invol...

We take a deep-dive into the underlaying structure of the the PHP source code and talk about the scanner, parser, the new AST layer (and the evil things we can do with it), and the Zend engine. Let's see how the PHP sausage is made!

We have a mashup recording with PHPUgly and PHP Town Hall during the community night at php[tek] 2017. We chat about OSMI, UUID's, git, product development, getting involved in the PHP community and funky socks.

We chat all things about the Laravel ecosystem.

Dependency Injection has been a design principle that the PHP community has embraced more fully than a lot of other programming communities. There's even an official PHP-FIG standard being discussed called PSR-11 which will standardize dependency injection containers. Today we chat all things dependency injection.

No matter how experienced you are as a programmer, at some point your app will generate errors and crash. Fixing problems with your app quickly is paramount in order to affect as little of your user base as possible. We discuss what is involved with implementing effective logging and crash reporting techniques in PHP to help you keep your apps up and running like a well-oiled machine.

PHP 7.1, the latest minor version of PHP, was released on December 1st. We discuss some things that went on behind-the-scenes that brought this new version to a stable release and we look at some new features that we can start taking advantage of today.

Guzzle has become the de-facto HTTP-client library for PHP. But recently a number of open source projects have been switching to HTTPlug which boasts itself as an HTTP-client abstraction. We chat about the problems HTTPlug aims to solve, the plans for its future and the reasons behind why some library maintainers have chosen to adopt it or not.

There's a lot more going on at Zend other than Zend Framework. We chat about the Zend ecosystem, from Apigility to Zend Certification and what Zend's role is in PHP internals.

There are two seemingly contradicting philosophies about how to charge clients for programming work. The hourly camp suggests that the client is paying for your skill and hiring you for your time. The value-based pricing camp suggests that the programmer should price a project based on its value to the client instead of the hours it will take to build it. Today we chat about these two ideas and di...

We chat about the open-source Behavior-Driven Development framework called Behat. We get a brief overview of how Behat can help us write more reliable code and also explore some best-practices when writing automated tests.

We chat about security in the the PHP community, encryption & hashing in PHP and a new-hotness crypto library called libsodium.

So you spend most of your time programming in PHP. You meet another programmer out in the wild. You begin explaining what you do. Do you find yourself using vague terms and actively trying to avoid the word "PHP?" Do you dread the question, "What language do you primarily code in?" Do you anticipate them scoffing at you when you say, "PHP?" We discuss why PHP has such...

Today the PHP Roundtable celebrates 2 years of generating nerdy discussions! We take a look behind the scenes of the PHP Roundtable podcast and chat with some nerds about what's going on the world of PHP.

Despite the fact that there was never an official release of PHP 6, it was going to be a real thing with a lot of great improvements to the engine and language. But why was this version of PHP never released? We talk with some previous and current internals developers to hear the story of what happened to PHP 6.

If you're just starting with programming & PHP, this episode is for you. We discuss some helpful tips to get you started with PHP programming such as some helpful learning resources and some common pitfalls to watch out for when learning to program.

We spend much of our time as developers managing the state in our applications. There are many different approaches and philosophies attributed to reading, mutating and storing state. The Event Sourcing pattern is an approach to managing application state. If we think of any given state of our app as a frame in a video, Event Sourcing allows us to scrub through past states of the app. Today we dis...

The demand for DevOps skills is growing more and more in modern web development. But all the hype and demand is met with myriad DevOps tools. Staying abreast of how these tools can help make our jobs easier can be daunting. So today we take a closer look at one of these tools called Docker which takes a microservices-architecture approach to managing your servers.

HTTP/1.1 will eventually be replaced by HTTP/2 so it's important for us PHP nerds to know all about the latest version of the HTTP protocol that's already running some of the internet's biggest websites. We discuss the things we need to know to start using HTTP/2 in our next PHP app. We also go briefly off topic to discuss the status of PHP 7.1 and the ramsey/uuid lib.

If you've ever gotten a number of weird looking characters in your database or on your website like, "�" and didn't know why, then this episode is for you. Those bizarre characters called "mojibake", rear their ugly heads when we don't account for a consistent character encoding. Today we discuss what character encoding is, how to accommodate for it in HTML, PHP & your data...

We record live from main stage at php|tek in St. Louis, MO. We discuss speaking at conferences and recent events in PHP-FIG.

Async? Isn't that like AJAX in Javascript or something? Most PHP developers encounter asynchronous code for the first time in Javascript, but not many are aware that PHP can do async too. We discuss asynchronous programming in PHP and how we might be able to implement it in our own projects using various libraries. We also take a look at how async features could be added to PHP core to support asy...