Embracing Enums

In January 2020, I delivered a conference talk titled "Enums: The Missing Data Type", which ended on a sour note: PHP probably would not have a native type for handling enumerations any time soon. To my surprise and delight, PHP 8.1 would release with a new "Enum" type less than two years later. Now we can really explore enumerations: both the theory behind them and the current PHP implementation. We’ll cover how representing things like statuses with enums improves immutability, readability, and type safety; the different types of enums available to us; and address the most common questions around the current limitations of enums. Resources: https://github.com/andysnell/embracing-enums

Downgrade to Upgrade and Other Composer Tricks

Thanks to the ubiquity of Composer, a PHP application may depend on dozens of third-party packages, each of which will define their own dependencies. When an application is deployed and working as expected, it can be difficult to prioritize the development time for package updates with breaking changes, and you might find some dependencies have slipped a few major versions behind their current release. Nevertheless, even if all root dependencies are up to date, some packages inevitably become abandoned, drop version constraints, or add an incompatible dependency. The end result: upgrading to the latest PHP version (or other package) is blocked by a tangled web of interdependent version conflicts and incompatible vendor code.

More Than Just a Cache

Redis is a popular key-value store, commonly used as a cache or message broker service. However, it can do so much more than just hold string values in memory! -- Redis is a full featured “data structure server”. As PHP developers, we typically don’t think about data structures other than our jack-of-all-trades array, but Redis can store hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets, in addition to operating on string values. In this talk, we’ll explore these basic data structures in Redis and look at how we can apply them to solve problems like rate limiting, creating distributed locks, or efficiently checking membership in a massive set of data.

Zombie Hunt: Find and Safely Remove Undead Code

Over time, and without careful maintenance, software projects tend to accumulate code and dependencies that just don’t belong in the code base anymore. Dead, rotting, and outdated code is a stumbling block to upgrading, refactoring, and maintaining legacy code, and at worse could become a security vulnerability. We’ll cover how to identify zombie code and dependencies, including using some newer tools built into PhpStorm and GitHub. We’ll also talk about different types of code tombstones and how to use them. Finally, we’ll discuss how to avoid having zombies in your code in the first place!

Enums: The Missing Data Type

PHP may not have a native data type for an enumerated type (“enum”), like other programming languages, but there are userland solutions we can leverage to get access to this powerful data type. We’ll see how representing things like statuses with enums provides immutability, improved readability, and type safety — preventing the kind of errors that happen with “magic strings” and class constants. In this session, we’ll be making our own immutable enums from scratch in order to explore the concept, but we’ll also introduce two libraries for use in your production code. We’ll also demystify the imposing-sounding “finite state machine” by using using immutable enum objects to regulate the transitions between statuses. Resources: https://github.com/andysnell/enums-phps-missing-data-type

Advanced File Operations