Development

Here you are, developing your code based on the Symfony2 framework. Creating a form here, add a Twig template there, until suddenly, boom! Your site doesn’t work anymore, and all the info you …

Take a variable, increment it with 1. That sounds like a simple enough job right? Well.. from a PHP developer point of view that might seem the case, but is it really? There are bound to be some …

To actually use Symfony2 forms, all you need to do is read some documentation, a few blog posts and you’ll be up and running in a couple of minutes. Understanding Symfony2 forms however, is a …

Do you have a toy PHP elephant? A blue one, or an exotic other color, maybe even a jumbo version? Maybe even more than one? Good, put it or them down on the floor, step away from it for a about 5 …

Jelrik and I wanted to share something (I forgot what it was) during the PHPBenelux conference. Probably too lazy to send it through email (tarring, getting it into the email client, sending.. …

A really neat trick in the Symfony Security component is the fact that you can impersonate or “switch” users. This allows you to login as another user, without supplying their password. …

Don’t you hate it when you are stepping through your debugger during a Symfony application debug session, and all of a sudden it cannot find files anymore as Symfony uses code located in the …

As a reminder (mostly for myself, but any googlers out there): After updating Leopard to OSX Mavericks (yes, I know it’s 2014!), i had to reinstall vagrant again. Using the latest version …

Once in a while I like diving into code and see how things work under the hood. And as the symfony2 framework consists of many different components, bundles and bridges, there is a lot to discover. …

One of the “golden rules” of symfony2 is to never hardcode urls or paths inside your code or templates. And letting symfony deal with the generation of your urls and paths makes your life …

I know: free software comes with a price. Most likely this price is your privacy. I’m not talking about 3-letter agencies snooping in on each and every call or email, but the …

A small update on the blogpost about PHP’s internal function usages: https://www.adayinthelifeof.nl/2014/07/25/internal-php-function-usage/

On a project where I worked alongside @basdenooijer, we needed to do a quick performance-test on a server. Since our shared hatred against (too) complex gui’s, Bas found an awesome cli-tool …

How many internal PHP functions (things like count(), strpos(), array_merge() etc), does PHP have? Depending on which version you use, and how many extensions you have loaded, somewhere between 1000 …

There are a lot of tools out there which can help you as a developer / self-employed contractor. And even though most of these tools are free (as in beer), I don’t mind spending a certain amount …

PHPMagazin.de has published my presentation about the first few milliseconds of HTTPS. This presentation has been presented by me at the International PHP Conference in Berlin last month.

A web application is not complete without an API nowadays. APIs allow third parties - or just end users - to use the data from the platform for whatever they want. But by allowing applications to make …

Sometimes (or actually, a lot of the time), handling forms will go beyond the basics. And even though Symfony2 gives you out-of-the-box a really clean way of creating forms, it sometimes just …

Solr is great for searching through a massive data collection in lots of different ways. But one thing Solr lacks is the possibility to search bitwise. And this by itself makes sense: Solr uses …

If everything goes according to plan (which never is the case), I’ll try and highlight some of the fascinating stuff that can be found inside the SPL. I do a lot of presentations about the SPL, …

Not all IDEs (actually, i haven’t seen even one IDE that does this), can run your unit-tests as soon as something changes.

If you do command line work under Linux, you probably are aware that when pressing <TAB> automatically completes your command, or give you options for it that are currently available. For …

I really love the travis-ci and scrutinizer-ci combo. Between them there are not many things missing like you would find in more complex systems like Jenkins for instance. Both travis and scrutinizer …

In the current day and age, using a plain HTTPS connection might not be the most secure way to communicate anymore. Sure, for your purposes and goals we can assume that this communication is safe …

**January 1, ** This year will be different. I will sort all my mail directly into different mailboxes. I will make sure my inbox will be 0 at all times. Yes! This is going to be an awesome worry-free …

Today, I’ve found a nice bug/feature/whatsmathing in PHP. I was playing around with writing a daemon and if you have any experience writing daemons (in any language), there are a few rules you …

One of the things that happens over and over again is that you need to check a value, and if it’s not set, it should set a default value. Normally, these variables could be initially set by …

I do a lot of consulting work and because of this I see lots of different development processes at many companies. Some of them are good, but most of them are not. And this problem isn’t caused …

The question I get asked a lot, is what makes Saffire different? The most honest answer: nothing. There is absolutely nothing that makes Saffire different from other language, because Saffire …

Exception handling is available in PHP since version 5. It allows you to have a more fine-grained control over code when things go wrong ie, when exceptions occur. But since PHP 5.5, exception …

It happens more and more: large projects where your symfony2 site is just a small part in the big picture. Lots of additional components might even play a bigger part, especially when you are dealing …

Most development languages will have some kind of printf() functionality. It takes a string, and can have optional arguments, depending on the placeholders you have set inside your string.

Even in these days, with full-featured PHP IDEs around, I still see PHP developers using var_dump() and die() to debug their code. Not only is this a very bad way of “debugging”, it has …

So, Saffire started as a way to “learn” a bit about flex/bison. I’ve dealt with these systems before a long time ago (pre-2K), and i forgot lots about them. So it was about time for …

One of the many things I do, on pretty much a weekly basis, is answering questions about REST and HTTP. Is this status code correct for X, should I use POST or PUT, is this hateoas enough, how do i …

I love working with composer. I think it’s a really neat way of dealing with dependencies in (PHP) projects and it’s not for nothing that big frameworks like symfony2 are using composer as …

If you know Symfony2, you probably are using (or at least, have heard of) the @paramConverter annotation from the SensioFrameworkExtraBundle. This is a really simple way to convert slugs into …

Confused by Perl? Bored by Python? Ruby too 2011? What’s the alternative? PHP? Come on! Well, seek no further since here is the next language for at least the coming decade: Saffire!

For a current project both me and a colleague are working on a big API system that authenticates through an OAuth system. Normally, such an API does all the necessary OAuth checking, handling of …

Doctrine’s DataFixtures are a great way to add test data to your application. It’s fairly easy to get this going: Create a fixureLoader that extends …

As you may now by now, I’m a big fan of using Puppet for configuration management. Since the rise of virtualization, these applications are becoming one of the more dominant tools in a …

This year the DPC (and DMC) bought all speakers one of the coolest gifts I’ve ever got (or seen) for speakers: an Arduino. During the speaker dinner, a lot of people were a bit confused on how …

Even though I really like using sed and awk, sometimes its hard to change or add parameters in configuration files. Big sed statements that may or may not work, double checking if everything has been …

During a presentation I gave yesterday about REST, there was a discussion about redirection (more detailed, a redirection from a queue to the actual resource during asynchronous operations). During …

In a span of two months or so, I’ve noticed a peak in implementation of bloom filters. Maybe the “if you got a hammer, everything looks like a nail” applies here, but statistically …

To continue our journey in pointless, but nevertheless fun things to create, I’ve created a simple PHP extension that allows you stream music data to an IceCast server in pure PHP. For this …

In the [last post][1], we created a template extension for our shout class. Next up, we need to do the actual implementation.

In the last post, we started with the implementation of the constructor and one method. Next up, let’s do a bunch more.

In the last post, we created a template extension for our shout class. Next up, we need to do the actual implementation.

Good news everybody! PHP has (finally) moved their version control from subversion to git and placed their repository on github. Meaning it just got easier to maintain PHP but also it makes it easier …

Yes, I’m a lemming. If a see a group of people jumping off a cliff, I will follow blindly. If somebody calls for more blogposts in the world, I happily write a blogpost for it. But, being the …

Doing development on multiple projects can be a burden from time to time. One project would be running on PHP 5.3, while another still needs 5.1. Sometimes you need a MySQL server, while on other …

A little bit less than one year ago (actually, 9 months ago), I’ve created a blogpost about creating a Pragmatic Investment Plan. Even though the year is not finished for me yet, I still like to …

Sometimes you hear about programs but you never really know how awesome they are until you actually use them. Unfortunately, at this point in life I wished I’ve discovered LaTeX around 15 years …

So probably you are aware I’m currently exploring the deeps on the Apache source internals. One of the discoveries I’ve made was a (for me unknown) command in mod_dir that will make your …

I think everyone has heard at least 5 five horror-stories when it comes to PayPal. And every time people will be upset, will tweet about it but then go on with their lives. I get it, I do the same …

I like to play with unfamiliar stuff. Not that I’ve never written an Android or java application, but this one is a bit different. It’s a simple game I’ve made while I was looking at …

When you are dealing with Zend Server on a puppetized machine you can run into trouble: Zend Server uses it’s own packages for maintaining things like PHP etc so when you are installing PHP, you …

Version 5.4 is soon to be launched as the next new stable release of PHP. Granted, there will not be major changes like we saw in version 5.3, but it will still have some nifty new features. Two of …

Ok, so it’s not he most beautiful website you will ever see. Nor will it be the one with the most content. But it’s my company website, and I’m proud of it. Even if it was only a …

I’m not exactly sure where I got the link to this book. It was probably a tweet or IRC-posting from somebody, but it actually was because of Amazon’s take-a-look-inside that made me buy …

The SPL is one of hardest things to grasp for most PHP developers. But why is this? The lack of documentation inside the manual, the fact that there are not many real-life examples, or maybe …

Because learning new stuff is just one of those things I need to do on regular basis, I’ve decided to dive into another framework than the ones I’m used to. Having dealt with mostly Zend …

ORM’s, or object-relational mappers, are a great way to convert (mostly) relational databases to classes in a object oriented language. It takes care of SO many things you do over and over …

Back in the good old days - and in internet-time, this actually means just a few years ago - people were quite happy with their LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. With this quartet, or a …

Using a disk image is very easy: download the file, mount it through a so-called “loopback” device and your OS will see the image as it was an real harddisk, CDR or DVD. When I needed to …

If you haven’t heard of MCollective, think of.. The Borg.. Except without the laser-eye, or the spaceship-cube, or the scary voices. Come to think of it,.. it doesn’t really have anything …

Not a lot of updates lately, but by no means I’m sitting still. The last few weeks lot of stuff has happened, and even more is to come. First of all, my second article has reached the …

REST is hot! But doing REST right is more difficult than most people think. Idempotent methods, hateoas, RMM levels… All terms that a REST developer should know and master. But from a learning …

When saying Apache, most developers immediately think of a web server. And this of course is true, Apache httpd web server is the most used web server today and the number of users keep on growing …

So there you are, you want to install some tool or application that didn’t come in a package, or you want to use the latest version. You download the tarball (*.tar.gz file), untar it, do a …

Last weekend I’ve visited the Loadays conference where I sat in the presentation of Thijs Feryn’s “Varnish in action”. Even though most of the talk was pretty familiar for me …

Question: how can a simple question asked by a colleague turn into a blog post? Answer: when he asked: how many different queries can I build when I have 270 fields? The answer to solve this problem: …

Memory is something (almost) no computer can do without. In todays world the saying goes: the more memory the better. But the way computers uses memory is very different than they did only a few …

It’s going to be a few busy weeks for me concerning speaking at conferences and meetups. Not only will I be speaking at the March edition of the phpBenelux meetup, hosted at our Enrise office, …

More good news: I’ve been invited to speak at the 4developers conference on april 4th in warschau, Poland. This time, my talk will be about the joind.in android application I’ve written, …

TCP is one of the core protocols for the TCP/IP suite. It provides a reliable data connection without you needing to worry about errors, congestion and other communication problems that haunt the …

So yesterday I’ve finally received my Arduino Mega. If you know me, you know I’m not even capable (or allowed) to handle a screwdriver, let alone something even more complicated things …

Memcache is a pretty well-known system inside the web-community and for a good reason. It’s fast, flexible, lightweight and it looks like installing memcache on your servers automatically …

The thing everybody (should) know is that when you want to secure passwords in - let’s say - a database, you have to hash to them. It’s kind of a golden rule but is it safe enough? Ask a …

Linux, and other unices have an excellent system to centralize log events. This is done through syslog. This system removes the need for every application to maintain their own log files and let the …

Recently, my colleague Jeroen van Dijk needed to extend (or better yet: override) the accept()* method for the RegexIterator. Turns out this wasn’t as easy as it might sound in practice. So …

From time to time I get amazed how people can setup their production servers. At the smallish development companies there is no real system administrator available to setup the systems and to keep …

If you maintain a tecnhnical programmers blog, you occasionaly need to post code snippets. I use a syntax highlighter plugin on my blog to make those snippets look nice and highlighted. It works and …

This post is not so much for developers as it is for the managers and bosses from those developers. As you probably know by now, managing software engineers (or programmers) is not an easy task. They …

Oauth is a very popular authentication mechanism used for a lot of web applications. And not without good reasons. It is relatively easy to implement, has different flavours (2-legged, 3-legged …

Did you know you can write a webserver in awk or that sed supports conditional jumps? Probably not… These tool (languages, actually) are much more powerful than most people know. The sed & …

Today I overheard two colleagues discussing one of my favorite subjects: encryption. The discussion was about that encrypting data (with a normal block cipher) was working perfectly in ECB mode, but …

Most people I know use sed for simple and fast translation of some keyword in files. For instance, changing ports and tags inside configuration files during deployment to production servers. This …

I’ve just uploaded the new slides for my Public Key Cryptography 101 presentation. It consists of 84 (!) slides about the basics of encryption, public key cryptography and implementations. How …

Today I’ve passed the Zend Framework Certification exam and with that I can finally close my new years resolution for 2010: doing 12 (tech related) exams in 2010. So I’ve seen a lot of …

I occasionally get into discussions where I find that other lack some basic understanding of the elementary systems which he or she has to work with everyday. Today was such a day: we went into a …

At almost every software company I’ve been involved in, used custom-made tools for various tasks. These tools range from simple shell-scripts for search&replacing data to large …

During this blog post I will talk about creating your own custom package repository. However, before you can setup a repository, you need packages. This previous post talks about setting up your …

Today I have pushed the v1.6 release of the Joind.in Android app to the market. A lot of things has changed, so it probably would have been more suited to rename it to v2.0. Here is a list of changes, …

A friend of mine posted a tweet about problems with Zend Guard just the other day. My friendly advise was: try using another encoder. Which he kindly ignored :) Which on my turn again made me wonder: …

Caching is THE magic solution when it comes to optimizing your web applications. There are a lot of caching strategies and applications outthere. Some prefer MySQL query caching, others use memcache …

Compression is used all around us every single day. You (or your girlfriend/wife most likely) folds your clothes nicely so they all fit in your closet. When recycling, you flatten the cardboard …

Developers are proud of their work. The best way to get unhappy developers is to force them to create and deploy some crappy software. Sales however, does not care about crap software.. it just needs …

When you visit PHP conferences nowadays, you’ll notice a lot of talk about the Joind.in website (http://joind.in). It’s basically a site where you can register a conference, all the …

Welcome to the first part of CybOS. We talk a bit about the bootsector. From part 2 on, everything is “kernel based”, which means we have setup the system and jumped to our main kernel. …

Somewhere in 1998 or even earlier, I started my own little project in creating a - functional - Operating System from scratch. Not a linux clone and not a MS-DOS wannabe. Just a simple OS that is …

Cardinality and selectivity are two keywords that are very important when dealing with optimization in MySQL queries and indexes. This article will go a bit in depth on both terms and tries to let you …

Error: Your email address is invalid. Every time I see those or similar words when I fill out a registration form I start to cry a little. It’s not my email address that is invalid, it’s …

TinyMCE is truly a remarkable editor. It’s the one I’m typing in now.. it’s the one we use for letting our e-commerce customers use for editing pages and it’s the one we use in …

It’s almost to easy to use a SELECT * FROM query in your code. First of all, you instantly get all the fields from your database so you don’t have to worry about changing your queries when …