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.
239 articles from this blog
A review of PHP's evolution in 2021, covering PHP 8 features, upcoming 8.1 additions like enums, and community trends.
Explains PHP 8.1 fibers for async programming, their conceptual use, and why they're a low-level tool not meant for direct application code.
Explores event sourcing as a pattern for software development, challenging the notion it's only for large-scale projects and discussing its core concepts.
A developer's perspective on Event Sourcing as a paradigm shift from traditional MVC/CRUD, based on a guest post for Event Store.
A developer recounts a critical security bug in a custom-built framework, arguing against writing your own framework for client projects.
Explores userland enum implementations in PHP before native support arrived in PHP 8.1, discussing the myclabs/php-enum package and its limitations.
An in-depth look at the new Enums feature in PHP 8.1, covering syntax, methods, interfaces, and backed enums.
A response to criticisms of PHP 8's breaking changes, arguing they are necessary for progress and offering advice for a smooth upgrade.
A developer's personal wishlist for improving PHP's design, focusing on stricter defaults like final classes and required type declarations.
A web developer argues that modern websites lack the creative soul of the early web, drawing a parallel to Star Wars's unique, nostalgic style.
Overview of new features and breaking changes in PHP 8, including JIT, union types, attributes, and the nullsafe operator.
A tutorial on upgrading to PHP 8.0 on macOS using Homebrew, including steps for Laravel Valet and managing extensions.
Explains PHP 8's null safe operator (?->), its syntax, differences from the null coalescing operator, and practical use cases.
A guide to setting up and configuring the JIT compiler in PHP 8, including enabling opcache and understanding the complex configuration options.
The author announces 'Front Line PHP', a new book teaching modern PHP, best practices, and the professional web developer mindset, launching alongside PHP 8.
Tips for creating high-quality pull requests in open source projects, focusing on communication, style guides, and documentation.
A guide to using Scopes in JetBrains IDEs to organize files with custom colors and filters, improving project navigation and developer experience.
A programmer argues that light color schemes are superior to dark ones for coding, citing the Pulfrich effect and eye physiology.
A proposal to add generic syntax to PHP for static analysis tools, bypassing runtime performance issues by transpiling.
Explains PHP 8 attributes, their syntax, and how to create custom attributes for adding structured metadata to code.
