Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

WordPress 5.0

WordPress 5.0 has been released today.  It is by far the largest update to the system since … since I can remember.  In fact, to some, it might look like a completely different system, thanks to a totally new editing experience – Gutenberg.

I have already upgraded this blog to the new version, and I’m writing this post with the new editor.  It is awesome!  It’ll take some getting used, but not because it’s difficult, rather because I’ve been using WordPress for too long.

I also can’t wait to see what all the creative people will come up with in their themes and plugins, pushing WordPress websites to the new high.

Great work and huge thanks to everyone involved!

12 Best API Monitoring Tools for Your Business

“12 Best API Monitoring Tools for Your Business” lists a bunch of services that are useful for the monitoring of your API.  Read the whole thing for more details.  Here’s the list of the services covered:

PHP: Countries and currencies


Many software projects deal with the lists of countries and currencies.  Some of the most common tasks include country an currency dropdowns, country flags next to the IP, or pre-filling country codes in phone numbers.

All of that information is of course standardized and you often just need a library or two to provide and use it.  And there are many of those.  We’ve been mainly using these two:

Today, however, I came across a better option – antonioribeiro/countries, which is a collection of country and currency information for Laravel PHP framework.  Laravel is not required though.  This library provides way more information and in a much more flexible way.  It includes:

  • 266 countries (with more codes, common names, official names, and more)
  • 256 currencies
  • 1,570 flags
  • 248 geometry maps
  • 248 topology maps
  • 4,526 states
  • 7,376 cities
  • and a lot more!




Practical Cryptography for Developers


“Practical Cryptography for Developers” is a free book (with GitHub repository) by Svetlin Nakov, which aims at teaching developers some of the most practical concepts of cryptography.  The book covers hashing functions, random generators, symmetric and asymmetric keys, digital signatures, and more.  Each chapter is rich with diagrams, illustrations, code samples, as well as exercises.




Avoid complex arrays in PHP


Now that PHP 7+ sorted out a whole bunch of problems with type-hinting of parameters, return values, variables and properties, we turn our attention to somewhat deeper issues.

Array is a native citizen in PHP.  Arrays are very convenient and are widely used.  However, if you stop and think about the times where you had to figure out somebody else’s code, I’m pretty sure complex arrays will come to mind at some point.

I’ve recently came across two completely independent blog posts which talk exactly about this particular area of problems:

Both are explaining the issues very well and make valid points.  As far as solutions and better ways go, apart from the approaches mentioned in these blog posts, I also remembered a recent blog post from which I linked to the data transfer object library, that solves exactly that.