February-2017.php

February is coming to a close, and it's time for a monthly round-up.

Even though February is the shortest month of the year I doubt it will be the least eventful. Especially the security scene has been on fire this month, and I doubt we've seen the final debris of this.

The month gave us two major security related findings from Google.

First, they announced the first practical way to create SHA-1 hash collisions, putting the final nail in the coffin for SHA-1 usage in any security relations.

Later in the month, Google's security research team, Project Zero, announced how Cloudflare's reverse proxies would, in certain cases return private data from memory, a bug which came to be known as Cloudbleed. The Google researchers worked with Cloudfare to stop the leak, but according to Cloudfare's incident report, the issue had been open for a while.

On a slightly different note. Laravel is popular PHP framework. Articles online about the framework seems to be about equal amounts of hype, and belittlement. Earlier this month a critical analysis of Laravel were going its rounds in the Twittersphere. I believe it provides a nice description of the pros and cons of Laravel, without falling for neither the hype nor the hatred that is often displayed in framework discussions in general, and Laravel discussions in particular.

As a lead developer, I spend a lot of time thinking about and making decisions on software architecture. So it's always nice with some inspiration and new ideas. Even though it's a rather old article by now, I believe Uncle Bob has some nice points when discussion Screaming Architecture, when he points out that the architecture of a piece of software should make it obvious what the software does, rather than which framework it's built upon.

Developers seem to find incredible performance gains when upgrading to PHP 7, all from Tumblr reporting more than 50% performance improvement to Badoo saving one million dollars per year in saved hosting and server costs. For the nerds out there, PHP core contributor Julien Pauli did a deep dive into the technical side of PHP 7's performance improvement.

On the topic of performance, I found Sitespeed.io, a collection of open source performance testing/monitoring tools, that I'd like to look more into.

Want to know more about what's going on in the PHP community? Here is a nice curated list of PHP podcasts.