PHP

PHP Channel’s 2015 2nd Trimester Update

Bruno Skvorc
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Another three months have passed, and our author roster has expanded again.

Silhouettes of formally dressed people, blurred, walking towards camera

We’ve got six more authors joining us this trimester and they are, in order:

Narayan Prusty, India

Narayan is a very active blogger at Qnimate who actually wrote for SitePoint extensively before – on the WordPress channel. It was only recently that he decided to dive into PHP related topics as well, debuting with a piece on sending emails with PhpMailer – one of the oldest and most reliable email sending packages in the PHP ecosystem.

Jamie Shields, UK

Jamie, a senior web developer at Stickyeyes, joined us a while back but took a while to push out his first article. It was worth the wait, though – he revisits the forgotten topic of paginating PHP-fetched data with jQuery, something many people either take for granted or flat out deride these days.

Rather than spend aeons learning [insert JS framework here] only to be considered out of date when [insert 2 days newer JS framework here] comes out, why not bake in those jQuery ajaxing skills and get things done while the cool kids argue about what to use?

Christopher Thomas, USA

Chris is an App Development Manager for one of the top medical schools in Southern California. He has contributed to a few open source PHP projects, as evident by his Github profile. He joined us rather recently, but pounced on a topic hot off the press – Laravel’s 5.1 release and the new Broadcast Events feature. In his tutorial, he focuses on developing an application which doesn’t need a refresh to reflect updates that happened elsewhere, giving the appearance of real-time.

Parham Doustdar, Iran

Parham Doustdar is a completely blind developer from Iran. He specializes in writing clean, maintainable back-end code with a high test coverage, and believes that code must be readable with the smallest amount of effort.

Parham debuted on SitePoint with a post about building an app for fetching a region’s most popular Github users and is a very active peer review program member. Due to his enthusiasm and excellent work produced so far, I’m confident we’ll see his name in the next Regular Authors section!

Nicola Pietroluongo, UK

Nicola, a developer from London and the creator of the Fakerino data faking library, got in touch with us rather recently. He wrote about the Chain of Responsibility – a seldom explored pattern that offers a very powerful implementation for linking together actions that depend on one another and where each has the ability to break the chain at any moment, stopping further execution, unlike the Decorator pattern to which this seems similar.

Nicola has some more work in the pipeline already, so stay tuned!

Vaihav Singhal, India

Vaibhav, a developer at Orobind with an interest in telecommunication is also one of SitePoint’s newest joinees, passing initiation with a list of JavaScript charting libraries. On the PHP channel, he revisited the context by listing the four best options for chart generation that have PHP components.

A hearty welcome to all! Hope to see much more from you in the near future!

Peer Review

Our Peer Review program is booming. The quality of posts has noticeably increased, and we’re constantly working on improving the process further.

Group of thumbs up and thumbs downs

We’ll be expanding the approach to other channels soon (the first one being the mobile channel), and have thus consolidated the documentation into a set of pages, rather than documents in individual channel Github repos. This was done in order to provide a decent point of entry into the peer review approach for all new authors and those interested in helping with reviews.

Join us?

That’s it for this trimester’s update. If you’d like to be kept up to date more regularly and be informed about posts and discussions on the PHP channel, feel free to sign up to our newsletter here and in case you’ve missed some, check out the archive.

Would you like to join up? Come help us out either as an author or peer reviewer – you’d be doing the community a huge favor, while growing your own developer profile! We’re looking for introductions to libraries and software, objective app benchmarks, PHP7 posts, tutorials on interesting features (maybe you had to build or optimize something unconventional at work recently?) and more – don’t hesitate to approach us!