Brent — Curator of Stitcher’s Community Feed, a community-driven, hand-curated content aggregator highlighting thoughtful, high-quality writing from across the web. The feed focuses on software engineering, open source, web development, infrastructure, and the human side of building technology. Readers can browse recent picks, follow via RSS, or contribute their own suggestions.
250 articles from this blog
Overview of new features in PHP 7.4, including arrow functions, typed properties, preloading, and the null coalescing assignment operator.
A Laravel developer explains solving a complex database performance issue by creating a custom Eloquent relation to efficiently load nested model data.
A concise guide to using Laravel's HasManyThrough relationship with a practical database schema and code example.
A developer's response to the PHP team about internal governance, RFC processes, and the need for modernized rules to improve language evolution.
A userland developer's open letter to the PHP team discussing RFC voting, backwards compatibility, and the language's development process.
Clarifies misconceptions about dependency injection, explaining what it is not: service location, shared dependencies, or auto-wiring.
Explains PHP 7.4's preloading feature, which improves performance by loading compiled code into memory on server startup.
An in-depth look at typed class properties, a major type system improvement introduced in PHP 7.4, covering syntax, initialization, and usage.
Explores how type systems in programming can reduce the need for extensive testing by ensuring correct data input, using a color conversion function as an example.
A podcast episode exploring the original definition of Object-Oriented Programming and comparing it to modern interpretations.
A developer shares statistics and insights from a year-long Laravel web application project, detailing code structure, frameworks, and testing strategies.
The author announces the launch of their new programming-focused podcast, 'Rant With Brent', promising concise and informative episodes.
An overview of PHP's evolution in 2019, highlighting performance gains, new features, and modern development practices.
A podcast episode discussing how using 'final' in code can improve maintainability, part of a series on SOLID principles and interfaces.
Explains the new arrow function syntax in PHP 7.4, detailing its concise syntax, use cases, and limitations compared to traditional closures.
The author announces a new monthly newsletter focused on PHP tips, mini-blog posts, and curated links for developers.
Explains SQL injection risks in Laravel's query builder, focusing on unsafe functions like addSelect and JSON shorthand, with a fixed vulnerability example.
Explains array destructuring in PHP using list() and shorthand [] syntax, covering key features and practical use cases.
A technical guide for upgrading PHP to version 7.3 on macOS using Homebrew, including troubleshooting and extension management.
Explains how to make Laravel action classes queueable for asynchronous execution using a dedicated package.
