The ZFort Group blog has posted their latest PHP Digest for March 1st - 25th, 2018: Digest #15.

A tool for quick smoke testing, a PHP parser in PHP, a cool extension for PhpStorm, an object graph visualizer, a library for implementing Event Sourcing in PHP apps, the lightweight in-memory message queue, and more. This digest seems to be really informative. Keep on reading!

Included in this list are topics like:

• News about the PHP language and releases
• PHP internals changes (moving towards PHP 7.3)
• Links to various interesting and useful tools
• Links to other tutorials, articles and updates from various projects.

The projects in that last item include Laravel, Zend Framework, Drupal and Symfony. Check out the full post for the full content.

The php[architect] podcast, hosted by Eric van Johnson and John Congdon, has posted their latest episode reviewing the latest issue of the magazine - the March 2018 edition - and featuring guests Chris Pitt and Oscar Merida.

Our hosts, Eric van Johnson and John Congdon look at Long Running PHP the March 2018 issue of php[architect] magazine.

Eric and John go over the March features about writing daemons with PHP, Linux containers beyond Docker, accessibility, code reviews, and more. Oscar shares his experience recently upgrading a PHP 5 application to PHP 7. An interview with Chris Pitt, about the community in South Africa and his article on Evolving PHP.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and get updates when new episodes are released.

On the php[architect] site they've shared an article from their latest edition of the magazine (the March 2018 issue) about reviewing code from the "Dev Lead Trenches" column (by Chris Tankersley).

Code reviews are one of the best ways to help a team ensure they’re writing the best code possible. In all of the jobs where we have done peer-lead code reviews, we have caught more bugs and had better discussions about code than in places or times where we just hammer code through the approval process. I know, I know; we all write beautiful, bug-free code, so why go through the hassle of a code review?

He starts with the idea of relating code reviews back to test-driven development. In TDD the architecture and quality thinking comes up front and with code reviews that same kind of thinking happens with the second (or third) set of eyes as the code progresses. He then lists out a few helpful tools for code reviews including GitHub/GitHub Enterprise's own pull request system and similar features in Gitlab. He ends the post with some suggestions for successful code reviews including "don't punish", "ask questions" and "have clear intentions" (avoid vague questions).

php[architect] magazine has announced the publication of their latest issue, the March 2018 edition: Long Running PHP.

Some of the articles featured in this issue include:

• "PHP Daemons and Long-Running Processes" by Tim Lytle
• "Evolving PHP" by Chris Pitt
• "Containers Are a Pile of Lies! Part Two" by Larry Garfield
• "Hands on With Accessibility" by Derek Binkley

Other topics mentions in the usual columns cover the Lumen framework, code reviews, signed Git commits, running a user group and the use of Twitter for PHP development. You can check out the full list of articles in this latest issue and get a copy of your own on the php[architect] site. If you're interested in the content of the issue, be sure to check out this month's free article.