Frameworks are among the most important tools we developers have and yet they are often taken for granted. The way I see it is a framework has two primary benefits: 1) saving individual developers time by providing predefined solutions to common problems and 2) allowing teams to work more efficiently by giving them a common model for coding standards, file organization, design language and more. However, these benefits quickly break down when framework conventions are broken or ignored, intentionally or otherwise.

My presentation from the June 2019 azPHP meeting on PsySH, the terminal-based interactive PHP debugger and REPL.

We've all been there... banging our heads against a wall for 20 minutes wondering why our app isn't working before we realize we forgot to seed our database when running migrations. Okay, easy fix:

$ php artisan migrate --seed
Migration table created successfully.
Migrating: 1996_02_27_123456_create_pokemon_table
Migrated:  1996_02_27_123456_create_pokemon_table
Seeding: PokemonSeederReflectionException : Class PokemonSeeder does not exist

While working on a project at work it was necessary to interface with the Okta API for user authentication and authorization. To accomplish this I created, an independent PHP client library. As it stood there were no official or unofficial PHP libraries available for working with the Okta API and I felt it would be beneficial to the community, as well as my employer, to publish this library as an open source project on the company GitHub account. So I talked to some people, sent some emails and ultimately got the legal department to okay it.

I'm loving The Witness. It's a beautiful game, and challenges me in a way very different from just about any other puzzle game I can think of. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a brain teaser and something off the beaten path of modern games.