Tales of (potential) Wisdom

I've been a professional software developer for more than 30 years. During this time, I've transitioned from using C to C++, Java and Perl to PHP and (of course) things like HTML, CSS and Javascript (and probably a few more that I've long since forgotten). The fundamental realization from all of this is, that the fundamentals of software development remain the same, but the implementation details change as we trade ease of use for performance, or vice versa.

On these pages, I share insights, lessons & anecdotes from the trenches of software development and the ecosystem all developers are part of. My hope is, that you, my esteemed reader, will find my tales & tips useful and/or insightful and that maybe I'll be able to help you in your journey as you proceed on your never ending quest to master the art of software development.

2024-01-27 • 3 min read • 57 views

Refactoring Journey Part 1: An initial roadmap

Refactoring PHP Laravel Upgrade

The company I work for runs on a legacy system which has been developed over the course of 10 years; under the hood it looks a little like the image above. Development is becoming increasingly difficult so the decision has been made, in order to improve the time to market when developing new features, to migrate the codebase to Laravel. The goal is to rebuild the app from scratch and to move everything to a modern and better organized codebase and, in the process, eliminate a lot of old and crufty code.

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2023-08-25 • 6 min read • 176 views

Benchmarking PHP vs Javascript vs Java

Benchmarks PHP Javascript Java Math

PHP has a reputation for being dog slow. But like most of the criticisms leveled at PHP, this opinion may be based on impression from 10 years ago. In this article we benchmark some math-heavy code to see how modern PHP performs when compared to Javascript and Java.

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2023-07-13 • 10 min read • 310 views

A Tale of ChatGPT Failure

AI Development Failure ChatGPT Bash

Some people insist that tools like ChatGPT will replace software developers. As this example goes to show, for now, we are safe.

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2023-05-13 • 4 min read • 398 views

Helping a Junior Developer Succeed

Developers Junior Growth Training

Everyone starts out as a junior developer, it is the natural course of things. Here I explain how experienced developers can help juniors grow and become successful and some pitfals to avoid.

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2023-04-10 • 3 min read • 349 views

The best Podcasts to make you smart and keep you well informed

Podcasts

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Whether it's in my car or on my occasional walks, I listen to podcasts to keep informed, entertained and to learn new things.

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2023-04-07 • 7 min read • 389 views

Piece of Cake: Laravel or CakePHP for your Project?

PHP Laravel CakePHP ORM

CakePHP is one of the older, yet still actively developed frameworks. With Laravel being the go-to framework these days, how does CakePHP compare to Laravel and why would you want to use it?

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2023-04-02 • 8 min read • 434 views

Improving your Publishing Workflow with OpenAI Whisper Speech Recognition

AI OpenAI Python Blogging Workflow Whisper

Writing a good content takes time and effort. It is however possible to shift some of the effort to AI Software thanks to the easily installable Whisper speech recogntion package.

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2023-03-24 • 7 min read • 444 views

Is AI Intelligent, or is it just very good at pretending?

AI OpenAI Reflections Insights

The capabilities of recently released AI system such as ChatGPT raises the question of whether such systems really are intelligent or whether they are only good at pretending to be intelligent.

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2023-03-12 • 10 min read • 598 views

Have we reached Peak AI-Hype?

AI Reflections IT Industry

AI is everywhere these days. The question however is, whether it represents a fundamental shift to a new technology or is it just the latest iteration of overblown promises?

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2023-03-01 • 4 min read • 450 views

Parsing Scraped Web Pages using Goutte

PHP Scraping Guzzle

In a previous post I showed you how you can use Guzzle to scrape web pages in parallel. This post will show you how to use the Goutte package to parse the HTML you scraped.

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2023-02-26 • 4 min read • 516 views

Parallel/Async Web Scraping using Guzzle

PHP Guzzle Scraping Async

Web scraping is cool, but parallel web scraping is even cooler, especially if you have a lot of data to scrape. While it can initially seem complicated, here is some sample code which will show you how to achieve this ...

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2023-02-20 • 4 min read • 326 views

The Rise of Paid Social Media Verifications

SocialMedia Twitter Facebook

Twitter started it, Facebook is now following suit. But is it a good idea or does it seem like a move driven by desperation? Well, it kind of depends on which platform we are talking about.

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2023-02-15 • 5 min read • 416 views

Tuning MySQL Insert Speed for Fun and Profit

Mysql PHP

Usually MySQL (and it's cousin, MariaDB) just work. However, during a recent debugging excercise, I ran across a scenario where performance was abysmally bad. Here's what I learned ...

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