In the last 2 years or so, I've run into a number of projects that claim to use the PSR-3 logging standard as published by the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG, or just FIG). Unfortunately, it's quite clear that those responsible for the project have not understood PSR-3 and how it is intended to work. This frustrates me greatly, as PSR-3's design addresses a number of issues that these projects are not benefiting from, and it reduces interoperability between projects (which was the whole point in the first place).

Rather than just rant angrily online (fun as it is, it doesn't actually accomplish anything), many of my PHP community colleagues encouraged me to blog about using PSR-3 properly. So, here we are.

Like much of the world I've been working to migrate off of Twitter to Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse. Along with a new network is the need for new automation tools, and I've taken this opportunity to scratch my own itch and finally build an auto-posting bot for my own needs. And it is, of course, available as Free Software.

Announcing Mastobot! Your PHP-based Mastodon auto-poster.

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At the $dayjob, I am working to have us adopt Lando as a development tool. Lando is a docker-compose abstraction layer that simplifies building standard development environments, such as a bog-standard LAMP stack, and is way easier than raw docker-compose for those cases.

I also wanted to be able to generate test coverage information as part of our Pull Request process. To be clear, test coverage is not the end-all, be-all of good tests, but it is still a useful metric, and can be a useful gate if used properly. Of course, generating test coverage requires running tests; and while most tests should be unit tests that do not require any services, not all are or can be, and many frameworks don't make true unit tests as easy as they should. (cough) So that means building a full dev environment to run tests. There's various tools for that, but I wanted to use GitHub Actions.

PHP 8.2 was released on 8 December, to much fanfare. And, as always, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the PHP language is evolving too quickly and breaking everyone's code. More specifically, it was the earlier, twin announcement that PHP 7.4 reached end-of-life on 28 November, as that has, somehow, forced everyone to suddenly rewrite their entire code base in a hurry.

And... while I sympathize with some of the complaints, I am once again left wondering "how?"

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Sorting algorithms are generally old hat to most programmers. They've either analyzed them to death in class, already written many of them, or work in a language where one is provided and they don't need to think about it. Or all three.

For PHP developers, we have a suite of sorting tools available to us: sort(), usort(), ksort(), uasort(), and various other letter combinations. All use Quick Sort internally, which is generally the best performing single-threaded option. Most importantly, many of them let us provide a custom comparison function to use when determining which of two values is larger or smaller.

A while back, I announced the release of my AttributeUtils library and its powerful attribute-based analyzer.

That library was built primarily to support the many edge cases I needed for Crell/Serde, a new, robust serialization/deserialization library built specifically for PHP 8.1.

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I was discussing recently with a TYPO3 colleague about performance, specifically caching. Both he and I are working on systems that may involve hundreds or thousands of objects that need to be cached for later use. The objects themselves are fairly small, but there's a large number of them. The data format is only internal, so we don't need anything standardized or parsable by outside systems.

PHP actually has two options for this use case: serialize()/unserialize() and var_export()/require(). But which is better?

Quick, to the benchmark mobile! The results I found were not at all what I expected.

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null has a controversial history. It's been called "the billion-dollar mistake" by its creator. Most languages implement null, but those few that do not (such as Rust) are generally lauded for their smart design by eliminating a class of errors entirely. Many developers (myself included) have argued that code that uses null or nullable parameters/returns is intrinsically a code smell to be avoided, while others (also myself included, naturally) have argued that is too draconian of a stance to take.

Anna Filina has a very good three-part series (properties, parameters, and returns) on how to avoid null in PHP generally. Alexis King has a related post (excuse the Haskell) on how to avoid needing edge cases like null in the first place.

However, I want to go a bit deeper and try to understand null from a different angle, and tease out the nuance of why one would really want to use it, and thus what we should be doing instead. To get there we'll have to go through a tiny little bit of type theory, but it will be quick and painless, I swear.

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