Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals have already started for 2019, and if you’re a PHP or specifically Laravel developer, there’s a lot to look forward to, especially if you’re looking to expand your knowledge and pick up some new skills on the cheap. In the following link, I’ll be keeping you up-to-date with the best and latest deals to keep an eye on — it’s the only time of year with these kinds of huge price drops, so don’t miss out.

Sometimes when working on a project, I’ll always want to run a handful of commands at the same time, some of which may return when they’re done, others might be long-running, like watchers or services actively exposing ports. This is something that might seem simple to do with a basic…

Private constructors are a pattern found in object-oriented programming languages that prevents the class from being instantiated, except by itself. The first time I saw this pattern in my programming career, I was confused. It wasn’t immediately apparent why such a feature would ever be beneficial in the real world…

Back when I started using PHP properly in the early 5.0 days, it felt like the language was pretty basic. Other languages were making leaps and bounds every year, and as time went on, PHP seemed to have stagnated. …

isset() is one of the most important tools at your disposal to validate data in PHP. As the name implies, it is designed to verify if a variable given to it is set, returning a boolean value based on the result. However, it has some quirks and behaviours that are…

Note: This post has been moved to my personal website, check it out to read the most up-to-date version and keep up with my latest postings: https://liamhammett.com/php-wishlist-typing-LkoZazl3 PHP is a loosely typed language. It doesn’t care what types you throw around. Unless you want it to care. The language has…

Note: This post has been moved to my personal website, check it out to read the most up-to-date version and keep up with my latest postings: https://liamhammett.com/php-wishlist-operator-overloading-wEQXAr4p Note: Since writing this post, I came across the pecl-php-operator extension on GitHub that does exactly what I described in this post, it’s…

Note: This post has been moved to my personal website, check it out to read the most up-to-date version and keep up with my latest postings: https://liamhammett.com/supercharge-githubcom-with-browser-extensions-geQEkzM0 As a commercial software developer, my day-to-day work for the last several years has involved working on closed-source software on private GitLab and…

Note: This post has been moved to my personal website, check it out to read the most up-to-date version and keep up with my latest postings: https://liamhammett.com/if-your-blog-doesnt-have-an-rss-feed-dont-have-a-blog-edr7LzWA It’s becoming increasingly common lately that people I want to follow are rolling out their very own blog platforms, in an effort to…