I’m getting quite excited with each update or announcement I hear about the upcoming PHP version 8. Sometimes I miss announcements, so I’m glad to see other people discussing them too.

Paul at Laravel News shared about the upcoming Match Expression that will be coming with PHP8 and it’s one of the updates that I can immediately see I would use.

When you look at the culture of any period, it’s possible to see influences from the past, and certainly in more recent times there’s been a roughly 30-year reach back into the past. During the 80s they looked back at the 50s, the 90s had a lot of 6os influences, I lost count of how many 70s parties I went to in the noughties and most recently we’ve been remembering the 80s through rose-tinted spectacles.

Of course now it’s the 2020s and fashion is starting to look back to the 90s. Max Böck writes about the return of the 90s web but quickly shoots down any return of the dancing baby.

Sometimes I have to help people work on so-called Legacy Code, which is loosely defined as code that developers are afraid to change. Over on the company site I wrote a blog post about dealing with legacy code.

A lot of developers, at the mere smell of legacy code will shout to redevelop from scratch, to seek out the latest new shiny and rebuild the product from the ground up. There can be benefits to that, for sure, but it isn’t the only way. I’m almost a fence sitter on this one, but if pushed I’d probably fall on the Maintain Legacy side of the fence. I don’t think it’s a black and white decision, though.

I read an article recently about the Top Ten PHP frameworks that listed the frameworks in order of popularity (although I’m not sure of the source of that data) and outlined some of their strengths.

I’ve used a few of the frameworks on the list to some extent or another (3 out of the top 4) and whilst there are definitely things I like about front runners Laravel and Symfony there are times when I wonder if they’re a bit over complicated for the majority of web development.

These days the world can seem a scary place. Extremism of all kinds is on the rise. People are scared and confused and they are lashing out.

More than ever it seems that this world needs love, hope, mercy and justice. Those are all themes you find running through the Old and New Testament. Sometimes as Christians we get a bit focussed on eternity, but that’s only part of the story.

It’s been a while since I’ve shared song lyrics on a blog, but I recently used my Google Rewards and downloaded an album that has been on my Google wishlist for a while. This song was on there and I thought I’d share the lyrics with you.