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
Explores the concept of 'PHP Editions' inspired by Rust, proposing opt-in breaking changes as a way to modernize PHP while maintaining ecosystem stability.
A developer shares their wishlist for future PHP features, including PHP editions for opt-in breaking changes and interface default methods.
A developer simplifies a content scheduling system by replacing a cron job and state machine with a smarter database query using future publication dates.
A developer reflects on how over-reliance on Tailwind CSS has eroded their ability to write raw CSS, leading to a feeling of being 'vendor-locked'.
A developer revives a dormant RSS aggregation project by rebuilding it with a new framework, HTMX, and simplified UX, rediscovering motivation through refactoring.
Explains the differences between PHP's readonly properties and private(set) asymmetric visibility, discussing their use cases for creating immutable data objects.
A developer reflects on using PHP 8.4's property hooks for a year, explaining their benefits and practical applications in code.
Explains the new pipe operator in PHP 8.5, showing how it simplifies chaining operations and improves code readability.
Explains Tempest framework's 'discovery' feature, which automatically scans and configures code without manual setup.
Announcing PHPverse 2025, a free online event on June 17th to celebrate PHP's 30th birthday with talks, Q&A, and giveaways.
Explains how Tempest PHP framework uses typed data objects for automatic request validation, simplifying web development.
Explains how to generate static HTML pages from dynamic PHP controllers using the Tempest framework's StaticPage attribute and data providers.
A reflection on the concept of 'theoretical software engineers' and the tension between ideal best practices and pragmatic, real-world development.
Overview of new features in PHP 8.4, including property hooks, chaining on 'new', and asymmetric visibility.
Explores Tempest PHP framework's 'unfair advantage' of starting fresh, questioning established patterns like Laravel facades, and embracing modern PHP features.
Announcement for a livestream to tag the first alpha release of Tempest, a software framework.
A developer reflects on the evolution of his custom static site generator, moving away from complex YAML configuration towards a simpler approach.
A developer's critique of inheritance misuse in OOP, comparing abstract classes vs. interfaces and advocating for better design patterns.
The author explains why their PHP framework, Tempest, will require PHP 8.4 as a minimum version, citing future-proofing, community advancement, and managing adoption.
A developer reflects on how his coding style and preferences have evolved over a decade, moving away from abstractions and clever code toward simplicity and practicality.
