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It is trendy these days to extol the virtues of remote working, and either implicitly or explicitly shame any company/manager that doesn't like it. While there are absolutely advantages to remote work or working from home, the one-sidedness of the conversation is, I believe, actively harmful. The idea of "going to work" is still a valid and useful one, and one that should not be cavalierly cast aside in Twitter snark the way it currently is.

I don't know exactly when I started writing PHP. It was shortly after the start of my second quarter of my freshman year of college, when a newly-met friend of mine introduced me to PHP as an easier to understand alternative to Perl. That puts it, I think, somewhere in January or February of 1999.

20 years ago, give or take a week. I have been writing PHP for two decades. That's more than half my lifetime. I feel old.

I thought it would be amusing (mostly at my expense) to look back a bit on just how much the PHP world has changed in the last two decades.

At a hackathon at the Madison PHP 2018 conference, on a lark I made a quick port of the classic ELIZA chatbot therapist to PHP. (It made sense in context, trust me.)

After a little further cleanup I'm happy to announce that it's now fully released on Packagist and just a quick composer require away!

(I'm sure that's a bunch of gibberish for the non-developers in the room, but it matters to the PHP developers, I swear...)

After a longer than intended delay, I'm happy to announce the 3.0 release of my Crell/ApiProblem library.

ApiProblem is a small, self-contained library for modeling IETF RFC 7807 "Problem Details" messages. (I know, more gibberish.) That is, it makes it easier for PHP developers to build a message for their API servers to handle cases where Something Bad Happened(tm).

I was asked by php[architect] a while back to review "Functional Programming in PHP, 2nd Ed" by Simon Holywell. I've been sitting on this review for a while, so it's time to finally get it done.

I am all for testing. Whether you always write unit tests in advance as Test Driven Development (TDD) advocates call for, write them after, write them alongside, a little of each, I don't care. Tests are your friend. You want tests, and specifically you want good tests.

There's a lot of opinions on what constitutes a "good" test, of course, and much is subjective to the type of code you're working on. However, since the release of PHP 7 I've found that while writing tests... I am never using a mocking library. In fact, I'm going to go as far and say that

You should never use a mocking library in PHP 7.

Before all of you gasp, clutch your pearls, and send ninja hit squads after me, let me justify that position.

Let's be controversial: In modern PHP, you should never type-hint an array.

Before you start throwing tomatoes, hear me out.

The other day I was working on some sample code to test out an idea that involved an object with an internal nested array. This is a pretty common pattern in PHP: You have some simple one-off internal data structure so you make an informal struct using PHP associative arrays. Maybe you document it in a docblock, or maybe you're a lazy jerk and you don't. (Fight me!) But really, who bothers with defining a class for something that simple?

But that got me wondering, is that common pattern really, you know, good? Are objects actually more expensive or harder to work with than arrays? Or, more to the point, is that true today on PHP 7 given all the optimizations that have happened over the years compared with the bad old days of PHP 4?

So like any good scientist I decided to test it: What I found will shock you!

One of my favorite podcasts is Make Me Smart, hosted by public radio's Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood. It's part of the Marketplace family of shows by American Public Media and is a friendly, casual look at the "big picture" of many of the stories of the day. One of their running themes is the "Make Me Smart question" that they ask everyone they interview, and encourage listeners to write or tweet or vlog in with their own answers to:

What is something you thought you knew that it later turned out you were wrong about?

It took me a while to decide what my own answer to that would be, but when I finally did I realized it was going to be way too long for a tweet to explain, so here we go.

I used to think Open Source was amazing. I've since come to realize just how awful it is.

With those incendiary words out of the way, allow me to explain. First, I need to draw a clear distinction between three often-confused concepts: Free Software, Open Source, and Volunteer Coding.