I’ve never been a rock. I’m about as passionate as someone can be when I choose to do something. Unfortunately that means I tend to throw myself (my raw unadulterated self) at my interests. It’s just who I am and who I’ve always been. This has positives and negatives associated with it (especially from a personal perspective).

Throwing yourself at a passion has enormous benefits. You get a lot done, you can truly touch people’s lives. You can really change the world. But you also take on a lot of risk. Putting yourself out there is the easiest way to get burned. When you’re passionate, it’s hard to not take things emotionally. It’s hard to not care. After all, caring is where you draw your power from.

I have always been held up by those that I knew were rocks. I always leaned on people who I know weren’t just abiding a flight-of-fancy, but who could wear the tide. But what happens when you start to see those who you thought were rocks, falter…?

Recently, there has been a spout of attention about how to deal with eval(base64_decode("blah")); style attacks. A number of posts about “The Dreaded eval(base64_decode()) - And how to protect your site and visitors” have appeared lately. They have been suggesting how to mitigate the attacks. This is downright bad.

Dear PHP-FIG,

Please stop trying to solve generic problems. Solve the 50% problem, not the 99% problem.

Signed,

Anthony

PS:

…

Last weekend I gave the opening keynote at PHPNW14. The talk was recorded, and no, the video isn’t online yet. The basis of the talk was centered around community and how we can come together (and how we are drifting apart). But there was one point that I mentioned that I think requires further thought and discussion. And that point is that there is far less trolling going on than it may seem at first glance.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the community lately around PHP and its future. The vast majority of this buzz has been distinctly positive, which is awesome to hear. There’s been a lot of talk about PHP6 and what that might look like. There’s been a lot of questions around HHVM and its role in the future of the language and community. Well, let me share with you some of my thoughts in this space…

Brandon Savage has recently posted two blog posts portraying his opinion that using private visibility on class methods can be considered harmful in a lot of situations. While I understand the point he is trying to make, I can’t say that I agree with it. I do like private visibility and think that it’s actually under-used in a lot of software. But it’s not because I think Brandon is wrong…

In recent months, a number of new frameworks have cropped up for PHP as PECL extensions (Including YAF and PhalconPHP). They promise to provide huge performance gains and lower resource usage for PHP applications. On the surface, they appear to be incredible tools for improving development. But they aren’t all they are cracked up to be. In fact, I would argue that they are actually not necessary at all.

In this day in age, it seems that the community trend is completely and unequivocally trending towards the use of web application frameworks. So much so that the defacto first comment to someone asking how to do something seems to be “Just use a framework, and it’ll solve the problem for you.” While I completely understand why this is the case, I can’t say that I agree with it. And while I do believe that frameworks serve a purpose, I think that they are vastly over-used. Let me explain why…

There’s been a lot of traffic lately about what’s wrong with PHP, and counter posts about how good it is. I’ve even fallen into the fray in an earlier article trying to step up and defend the language. The problem with almost all of these posts is that they focus on the language itself and what’s wrong (or right) with it. This is not one of those posts.

A few weeks ago I was sparked into a twitter conversation with Larry Garfield (@Crell) about the value of comments in code. Really, twitter is not the best place for that conversation, so I decided to write this post to illustrate my beliefs on commenting. Let’s start this story with the tweet from Larry that set off the conversation:

Nothing drives home the need for good code comments like working on code that doesn’t have them.

A pretty innocuous comment that is quite insightful. But that led me to respond with:

Nothing drives home the value of good, clean code by working on code that doesn’t need comments.

That led to an interesting discussion that just couldn’t fit on twitter. So let me explain…