The use of Beanstalkd as a queueing system What is an asynchronous queue The classic wikipedia quote (Message queue) In computer science, message queues and mailboxes are software-engineering components used for interprocess communication, or for inter-thread communication within the same process. They use a queue for …

Phew. That would have been embarrassing if I'd not passed my ZCE on Thursday afternoon (Jun 4th, 2009).

Just a quick note on what is going to be posted in the next few weeks – I've got a few significant pieces in mind for various topics – including: Doing the work elsewhere – asynchronous queues This is going to be a series of articles – and to support it, I'm rewriting some code that I had originally wrote for my last …

Back at the PHP London Conference at the end of February, iBuildings was offering a little test, with prize for people that could do well answering the sort of questions that are on the ZCE exam. Never one to turn down something useful for free, I took ten minutes to answer the eight questions. A few weeks later, I get …

Well go figure. I’ve just won $50 (Canadian, that’s about $3000 USD by now) of books and ‘stuff’ from PHP Arch, care of its publisher, Marco Tabini's, blog. He’d put a little puzzle up last night, some long numbers, and a few short. I recognised them as almost ISBNs – it wasn’t hard to figure them as having dropped a …

see my previous post on the topic, #1. My last post ended up more as a how-to than what-to. This time, I'll say why you should have local copies of the documentation for most of the tools you use. I'll also tell you the sort of things I always have handy as well. Getting a local copy of php.net - and getting installed …

When you have a library, like PEAR or Zend Framework – or even just the whole PHP language library – it’s absolutely vital you know what it can do. What you don’t know can cost you weeks of effort and pain. I found this out (again) today, but it’s not my pain – it’s an employee who was too busy deciding that the Zend …

As I mentioned in my second post, ZCE prep – and dumb tests - about open book tests (like Brainbench), having a copy of all the relevant documentation can be incredibly useful, if only from a speed issue. Knowing you can just open a new tab and type a few words to get the information on a function, or concept from the …

Well, I've just completed the PHP Arch 'Vulcan' practice test – the first of up to five such practice tests I've purchased. I have quite deliberately not gone through what study materials I have on hand before I took this test (I wanted to get a baseline), but none the less got an 'EXCELLENT' final score, and the same …

A more recent tool to use I'd suggest using phpcsfixer with one of the default coding standards - PSR-12/PER-Coding-style or @Symfony. Extending PHP_CodeSniffer by Raphael Stolt shows how to quite easily add to a tool that will report what parts of your PHP source needs a clean-up, from the built in 'sniffs' for coding …