A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.
Payum – PHP 5.5+ payment processing library, which is self-described as:
It offers everything you need to work with payments: Credit card & offsite purchasing, subscriptions, payouts etc.
The documentation looks extensive, and the list of supported gateways is probably the longest I’ve seen.
This SitePoint PHP blog post (read at Planet PHP if the site is unavailable) brings to light a very useful feature available since PHP 5.6 – ellipses in functional arguments, which allows to define a variable number of arguments to a function.
I’ve seen the mentions of ellipses a few times now, but I assumed that it was a PHP 7 feature. Turns out PHP 5.6 users can enjoy it as well:
<?php
function sum(...$numbers) {
$acc = 0;
foreach ($numbers as $n) {
$acc += $n;
}
return $acc;
}
echo sum(1, 2, 3, 4); // prints out 10
This is very useful, but, as SitePoint PHP blog most mentions, it can be made even more useful with type hinting of the arguments. For example:
<?php
class Movie { private $dates = [];
public function setAirDates(\DateTimeImmutable ...$dates) {
$this->dates = $dates;
}
public function getAirDates() {
return $this->dates;
}
}
The limitation is that you can only hint a single type for all the arguments. The workaround this is to use collection classes, which basically work as strictly typed arrays.
Shields.io provides a large collection of badges that you can use in your project documentation (like README.md over at GitHub or BitBucket), which shows a variety of metrics for the project – latest version, number of downloads, build status, and more. Pretty much anything that you’ve seen used by any project on GitHub is supported (I couldn’t think of a badge that wasn’t).
Now, if only there was a way to insert these things automatically somehow …
composer-git-hooks looks awesome! From the project page description:
Manage git hooks easily in your composer configuration. This package makes it easy to implement a consistent project-wide usage of git hooks. Specifying hooks in the composer file makes them available for every member of the project team. This provides a consistent environment and behavior for everyone which is great.
asciinema is a tool to record terminal sessions and share them as videos. But unlike many other tools that provide this functionality, ascinema does a very smart thing – instead of encoding the session into a video it interactively replays it in a text mode, which allows one to select and copy-paste commands and outputs from the playback. The resulting “video” is also much lighter and faster than it would be if encoded into a video stream.
This is great for demos, tutorials, and other more technical scenarios. The website also has a collection of recent and featured public screencasts.