In this episode, I had a wonderful chat with fellow Australian and former expat, Nigel James, about his journey from SAP consulting to PHP, and what life was like as a consultant over so many years in London. Our time there overlapped, but we never met. We also talked about why PHP is still an excellent choice to develop with, how Laravel is a Marketing-lead development (and that that's not a good thing), and so much more.

So if you're keen to get into software consulting, or want to do better at it, tune in to hear from someone who's been doing it for years.

Some key takeaways are:

• Programming is simple: Sequence. Selection. Repetition.
• Almost regardless of your career path as a developer and your skills, you need to develop some business savvy.
• A great selling point for PHP (at least in the early days) was that you didn't have to pay Microsoft for so much; this was one of my key motivations too, back in the PHP 3.x days.
• Are layoffs necessarily all bad, or can they actually be helpful?
• Are layoffs in tech truly necessary right now, or are they being made to satisfy investors?

Links

• ABAP
• SAP
• Zend Framework 1 (now Laminas)
• PHP London
• PHP and MySQL Web Development (Developer's Library)
• Laravel

Guest(s): Nigel James (@njames // phpc.social/@njames).

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew[at]matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter for the Web Dev With Matt podcast network.

Support
If you want to support the show, you can always buy me a coffee. I'd greatly appreciate your financial support.

In this episode, I had a long and winding discussion about software testing with the legendary Grumpy Programmer Chris Hartjes.

We talked about the importance of learning the essentials of software testing rather than focusing on a particular framework, as that makes your skills so much more transferable. We discussed how to approach testing; it's not a framework-first approach. And we also discussed the latest PHP testing framework, Pest PHP, covering what it brings to the table and whether people should just stick to older veterans, such as PHPUnit, or not.

Some key takeaways are:

• You should learn the essentials of testing first, and not a specific tool such as PHPUnit or Pest PHP
• It's better if people worry less about the tool and more about testing concepts
• The people who write the best tests are also really talented programmers, because you can't be a shitty programmer and write good tests
• Testing is an intermediate skill. You have to know how code before you can write tests
• When approaching testing something, ask: "How would I manually do this?". Don't think about testing concepts or a framework straight away
• If people would spend as much time learning the fundamentals (of testing), they'd see that their skills are transferable.
• Composer saved PHP. It kept PHP from just being the thing that runs WordPress
• Bill Joy on Linux and macOS: "Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux.'

Links

• The Arrange, Act, Assert pattern
• Pest PHP
• PHPUnit
• Test-Driven Development by Kent Beck
• Rector
• PHP's Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)
• NixOS
• Mozilla
• The RemoteOK.io thread
• Laravel

Guests: Chris Hartjes.

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew[at]matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter for the Web Dev With Matt podcast network.

Support
If you want to support the show, you can always buy me a coffee. I'd greatly appreciate your financial support.

In this episode, I had the pleasure of continuing to talk with Arne Blankerts about one of my favourite topics: containers. We talked about his misgivings with Docker, his love of Podman, some of the history of containers and container plumbing in the Linux kernel, how Docker's architecture can lead to security issues, and so much more.

If you're in to containers in any way, or are thinking of getting in to them, this episode is for you!

Some key takeaways are:

• Podman Compose is almost an equivalent to Docker Compose
• Podman is virtually a drop-in replacement for Docker
• Podman doesn't require a daemon and doesn't require root
• Isolated processes just make sense
• The kernel can't directly control containers when using Docker

Links

• Podman
• Kubernetes
• FreeBSD Jails
• chroot
• Introduction to Control Groups (Cgroups)
• Demystifying containers, part 1: Kernel Space
• Linux Containers (LXC)
• Podman Compose
• Laravel - The PHP Framework for Web Artisans
• Dan Walsh (Twitter, Blog)
• Podman in Action, by Dan Walsh
• Docker security issues
• Confoo.ca
• The future is now: Replacing Docker with Podman
• Honey, I shrunk the Container!

Guests: Arne Blankerts (@arneblankerts).

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew[at]matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter for the Web Dev With Matt podcast network.

Support
If you want to support the show, you can always buy me a coffee. I'd greatly appreciate your financial support.