PHP

The 3 paragraph pitch

Submitted by Larry on 20 October 2017 - 5:21pm

Earlier this week a fellow PHP public figure tweeted saying that I write great session proposals for conferences. After I finished blushing I reached out to him and we talked a bit about what it was he likes about them. (Whatever I'm doing right, I want to know to keep doing it!)

Based on that, I figured it would be educational to dissect how I go about writing session proposals for conferences and hope that conference organizers don't catch on to my tricks. :-)

Best practices are contextual

Submitted by Larry on 23 August 2017 - 5:51pm

Articles, blog posts, and Twitter debates around "best practices" abound. You can't swing a dead cat without bumping into some article espousing the benefits of designing and building software a certain way. (Side note: What kind of sick person are you that you're swinging a dead cat around? Stop that! You're desecrating the dead!)

What nearly all of these articles fail to convey is that "best practices" are contextually-dependent. Always. For one, they evolve over time; really, there is no such thing as a "best practice"; There are "leading practices", which is an inherently changing and growing definition as the technology and market changes and as we as an industry learn more and discover new and exciting ways to royally screw up.

PHP 7 Explained: A review

Submitted by Larry on 31 December 2016 - 1:50pm

The team over at thePHP.cc recently published an ebook entitled PHP 7 Explained, "Everything you need to know about the next generation."

A few weeks back, I received an email from them stating "As a token of our appreciation for your involvement in the PHP community we would like to gift you a copy of our eBook." Yay, free stuff! Since I'd gotten it free, and it's of timely use to the PHP world, I decided to publish a formal review.

Disclaimer: I was not asked to write a review, although the authors did ask for feedback. The only compensation I receive for this review is the book itself, which was sent without the expectation of a review. Also to the authors, yes feel free to quote portions of this review on the books site as long as it's credited.

New Drupal, new Platform, new PHP, new year

Submitted by Larry on 31 December 2016 - 12:19pm

OK, well, it took a while, but I've finally gotten my blog off of Drupal 6. :-) Welcome to the new and improved Garfieldtech.com! My blog is unsurprisingly rather bland, as it's, well, a blog. That made updating to Drupal 8.2 using the Drupal migrate module reasonably easy. It wasn't hiccup free, and a few not-yet-updated modules got lost along the way, but it wasn't an epic struggle, either. There were only two major hiccups:

Composer vs. Linux Distributions: A Mental Model Battle

Submitted by Larry on 24 February 2016 - 11:10am

Recently, Gentoo documented what they view as the Composer Problem: Basically, PHP projects using Composer can't be packaged the way they want to package it, with system-level shared libraries. This is not a new complaint; Other distributions have complained about Composer's impact before. But fundamentally I think the issue stems from having the wrong mental model of how modern PHP works when viewed from a distribution or sysadmin perspective.

Giving Back in 2016

Submitted by Larry on 23 January 2016 - 5:18pm

Three years ago, I ended 2012 with a call to the Drupal community to Get Off the Island. Mainly I wanted to encourage Drupal developers to prepare themselves for the major changes coming in Drupal 8 by connecting with other PHP projects and with the broader community, and called on people to attend non-Drupal conferences in order to visit and learn from other communities.

Anyone can code

Submitted by Larry on 24 December 2015 - 4:22pm

One of Pixar's best movies is the 2007 "Ratatouille", the story of a rat named Remy who teams up with an unskilled nobody human to become a gourmet chef. Toward the climax of the film (spoiler alert!), the uber-critic Anton Ego visits their restaurant and is blown away by the quality of the food, producing the next day a genuinely humble and reflective review. While the whole review is one of the highlights of the film, there's one segment in particular I want to call out:

In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook." But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere. [emphasis added]

It's one of the central themes of the film, and Pixar I believe captures that line beautifully. It's true, not everyone is a good cook. Not everyone can be a good cook. However, good cooks come from a myriad of sources and backgrounds (and apparently species).

And the same concept applies to almost any skilled field, including that of programming.

Drupal 8: Happy, but not satisfied

Submitted by Larry on 3 December 2015 - 1:55am

Two weeks ago (hey, I've been busy and trying to sleep for once), after 1716 days of work by more than 3312 people the Drupal community finally released Drupal 8, the latest release of the best community-driven web software in the world. The blogosphere is already filled with congratulatory blog posts celebrating the immense accomplishment, and deservedly so.

A number of people recently have asked me how I feel about Drupal 8's release, especially around the PHP community. Overall, my answer has to be that I'm happy, but not satisfied.

Why I speak

Submitted by Larry on 7 November 2015 - 4:51pm

A few weeks ago I gave a keynote presentation at PNW PHP in Seattle. It was the second time I'd given that particular talk, Eating ElePHPants, a quasi-history and lessons-learned of the process of rebuilding Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.

Overall reception was good, and afterward I was appraoched by a woman who was trying to push for better development practices and refactoring a legacy code base at her company. We've exchanged a few emails since, as she goes about trying to subvert her company's development process for its own good to introduce testing, refactoring legacy code, decoupling, and other concepts that many of us on the conference circuit take for granted.

In the course of that email conversation, she had this to say:

When I first started with this entire effort about 2 months ago, I thought I will never succeed, and I thought I had set myself up to failure - until I heard you speak about your experience. Your talk was highly inspiring and got me excited to invest more time into what I was doing and I believed in myself for the reasons I chose this effort.

And later...

All the tech talks helped me realize that I can get somewhere, made it seem within reach, but you and Adam Culp [who also gave a session on refactoring] left me inspired.