In this episode, I had a wonderful chat with fellow Australian and former expat, Nigel James, about his journey from SAP consulting to PHP, and what life was like as a consultant over so many years in London. Our time there overlapped, but we never met. We also talked about why PHP is still an excellent choice to develop with, how Laravel is a Mark…

In this episode, I had a long and winding discussion about software testing with the legendary Grumpy Programmer Chris Hartjes. We talked about the importance of learning the essentials of software testing rather than focusing on a particular framework, as that makes your skills so much more transferable. We discussed how to approach testing; it's …

In this episode, I had the pleasure of continuing to talk with Arne Blankerts about one of my favourite topics: containers. We talked about his misgivings with Docker, his love of Podman, some of the history of containers and container plumbing in the Linux kernel, how Docker's architecture can lead to security issues, and so much more. If you're i…

In this episode, I had the pleasure of talking with my mate and colleague Darryl Ware, who I worked with in Brisbane (Australia) oh so many years ago, about the changing face of tech in Brisbane. He shared with me (as I've been living in Europe for the last 15 years) that it's changed from a broadly PHP-based city to a much more Golang-centric plac…

In this episode, I had the pleasure of talking with Doug Bierer about his history in computing, a history which if you're a computing hardware or programming nerd, you're going to love. Doug shares how he got in to computing with the TRS-80 and Commodore 64. How he taught himself to program in Assembler during shifts when he had some quiet time, an…

In this episode, I had the absolute pleasure of talking with Mihalis Tsoukalos, a long-time Twitter friend and someone who's given me loads of advice, about software development. He shared with me so much about his journey with C-based languages, particularly Python, C, Go, & Rust. He talked about Linux shells including Bash and Zsh (and of course …

It was a pleasure to sit down and chat with Oliver, a full-stack software consultant based in South Wales, in the UK. We talked about so many things which I'm sure so many developers can relate to, even those who've only been developing for a relatively short period of time. Some key takeaways are: Both working remotely and working in an office hav…

It was a pleasure to sit down and chat with Karl for this episode which went off on such a massive tangent at the start. Despite that, we felt it was worth keeping, as sometimes it's worth doing things a little differently. If you want to skip to the more tech/work/career aspect of the episode, jump up to about the 21 or 32 minute mark. Some points…

It was a pleasure to sit down and chat with Andreas. He shared what it was like taking over phpugffm (the PHP user group in Frankfurt, Germany), why he believes some devs aren't involved in user groups, how to become a better public speaker, and an excellent form of development: Documentation-driven Development. Some key takeaways are: When you los…

It was great to be able to talk to Andrey for this episode. He shared some of his journey to becoming a professional software developer (starting off with QBasic and Delphi), teaching software development to school kids, before moving to JetBrains to be the lead designer of the Kotlin language. Links Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Ori…

It was great to be able to sit down and chat with Cal again, as he shared so much great information, including: How he got started using WordPress How the WordPress API has changed WordPress How he gets podcasts out the door so quickly through scripting and proper processes; and How to be a better communicator. Some of the key things to know about …

Links Mastering Laravel Learning How to Learn NoCompromises.io No Compromises podcast SourceDive.com Midwest PHP ncurses installer Guests: Joel Clermont (@jclermont). Hosted By: Matthew Setter. Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew@matthewsetter.…

Links NASA The Australian Weather Service (now the Bureau of Meteorology) Psychological Safety Code Reviews Pull Requests (PRs) Red Hat Alta Vista Windows 95a The Gnome Bar Ganbaro Digital Ltd Guests: Stuart Herbert (@stuherbert). Hosted By: Matthew Setter. Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know so…

Links Steve on YouTube Laravel Go Rust minicli Bash Call of Duty Laravel News Guests: Steve McDougall (@JustSteveKing). Hosted By: Matthew Setter. Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: [email protected]. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter…

Links Functional Programming The Principle of Least Surprise TypeScript Web Scraping with PHP, 2nd Edition The Spark framework The Sinatra framework The Ada language Linus Torvald's talk at Google Guests: Matthew Turland (@elazar). Hosted By: Matthew Setter. Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know s…

We should be back with a new season of the podcast after the Summer but will let you know, exactly, when that will be when we have a firm date set. Hosted By: Benjamin Eberlei and Matthew Setter. Thanks for tuning in to the Undercover ElePHPant. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone very knowledgeable in writing highly performa…

So, what are those tips? Have a dedicated workspace, or work area - one that is separate from the rest of your home Get the tools you need - and make sure you have a decent internet connection! Have a regular routine (both a start and end time and how you kick off your day) Talk to those who you live with so that you educate them about how working …

Samuel shared a load of excellent advice that you can start using today in your PHP applications, including: The common challenges with background processes and PHP? Why background processes & workers can be an important aspect of PHP applications? What angel processes are How to handle failed background processes How to handle memory in PHP with l…

Arne shared a load of excellent advice that you can start using today in your PHP applications, including: What PHP-FPM is What differentiates PHP-FPM from Apache/mod_php? NGINX's different pool types (dynamic, static, and ondemand) How to configure PHP-FPM for high-performance and throughput Using multiple PHP-FPM pools in the same application? Pl…

Here are some key takeaways: To start a user group, you only need three things: 1) a location, 2) a speaker, and 3) food. That’s it! What's also helpful is a mailing list to stay in touch. In his talks he tells a story. But he's also a perfectionist; He wants to make as much of an effort as he can. In the early days, he enjoyed speaking and did it …

In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew talk with Jordi Boggiano about logging in production applications as well as logging best practices. We also talk about logging formats, filtering log messages, Monolog and loads more! Jordi shared a load of excellent advice that you can start using today in your PHP applications, including: How to get started …

In this episode, I talk with Matthew Turland about the effort involved in updating one of his technical books and programming in multiple languages (PHP and Ruby) plus loads more! Matthew shared a load of excellent advice in this warm, fireside chat. Links Matthew on Twitter (@elazar) matthewturland.com Web Scraping with PHP, 2nd Edition | php[arch…

In this episode, I talk with Matt Stauffer about how he started Tighten, how he got into Laravel, why he's such an active member of the community, what he looks for when hiring developers and loads more! Matt shared a load of excellent advice that you can start using today in your career. Links Tighten onramp.dev Laravel Up and Running, by O’Reilly…

In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew talk with Matthieu Napoli about Shared-nothing and Shared Everything Architectures. We also talk about Bref, Swoole, ReactPHP and loads more! Matthieu shared a load of excellent advice that you can start using today in your PHP applications, including: What Shared-nothing and Shared Everything architectures are…

In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew talk with Nils Adermann about integrating with third-party APIs in PHP. Nils shares some excellent advice, including: Handling retries and timeouts Efficiently and effectively working with multiple API vendors How to work with vendors when their actions break your apps Different types of responses (the good and…

In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew talk with Bastian Hofmann about handling retries and timeouts in PHP. Bastian shares a load of great advice, including: Having dedicated hosts for certain traffic Distinguishing between normal users and admin users Offloading work to asynchronous jobs Default socket timeouts and max execution times Automatic re…

In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew talk with Robert Douglass and Larry Garfield from Platform.sh about running PHP applications on multiple servers. Robert and Larry share a load of excellent advice, including: - Why you need to use Load Balancers (along with what they are and some of the key options) - How PHP is exceptionally well suited to be…

In this episode, Benjamin and Matthew, talk with Marco Pivetta (ocramius) about: PHP 7.4's new preloading feature: what it is, how it works, the benefits and drawbacks of using it The speed differences between different versions of PHP (especially in 7.x) The difference between OPcache and Preloading How Composer's autoloader may soon be a thing of…

Thanks to PHP being an interpreted language and it that it has a garbage collector, PHP developers don't often have to think about memory management. Unlike developers in compiled languages, such as C/C++, we don't have to give that much thought to memory allocation and deallocation. However, it's helpful to have a broad understanding of how garbag…

Welcome to the introductory episode of The Undercover ElePHPant. This is the welcome episode, where we give you the rundown on what the podcast is about, who we, your lovely podcast hosts, are and what you can expect to hear. So, let's get started. This podcast aims to do three, core, things: Uncover details and secrets of scaling PHP and how to ma…

In this episode, I have an extremely interesting, inspiring, but most of all educational chat with my mate Najaf Ali, founder of Happy Bear Software, about what it's like to go from being an independent software consultant and freelancer to running a software consulting business. ★ Support this podcast ★…

In this episode, I have a very educational, informative, and entertaining chat with all-things cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Mr Bruno Skvorc. I admit, I don't know a lot about the different technologies and terms. But that didn't stop Bruno sharing his wealth of knowledge and experience about them all with me - and so much more. ★ Su…

In this episode, I have a very informative chat with Robert Basic, a very thoughtful and insightful software engineer, consultant, open source contributor from Serbia. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode, I have the absolute pleasure of speaking with one of my mentors, Zend Framework project lead, Matthew Weier O'Phinney. In addition to being a very experienced developer, Matthew's a very thoughtful and considerate person. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode, I'm keen to talk with you about career changes. This is something that I'm currently going through and have been through in the past. It's not uncommon, especially in the tech field. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode, I'm very excited to be back after so long away from the mic! I'm so excited that I'm overflowing, effervescing even with ideas, enthusiasm, and passion to be back behind the mic with you. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode, I have a fireside chat with Ophelie Lechat, SitePoint's manager of operations ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Wes Bos. If you're not familiar with Wes, he's a designer, developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and teacher. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode I sit down with Asciidoc project Lead, and all round good fella - Dan Allen. If you love technical writing, technical documentation, and documenting your code, then this is an episode you're not going to want to miss. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode we pick up where we left off in [episode 19](/episode/episode-0019), with a slight segway. But, instead of starting to look at how to use Twitter, and other social media tools, let's talk about something more important. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode I decided to go a little off track and have a bit of a rant, a bit of an "letting go" session in light of the recent US election and Brexit. I'm no fan of either, and I share why in the first half of the episode. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode I wonderful chat with Matthew Turland about what it's like speaking at conferences and mental health - especially within the IT community. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode I chat with Chris Cornutt, founder of PHPDeveloper.org, websec.io, and Lone Star PHP about conferences and all things security. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode I chat with Chris Hartjes, the Grumpy Programmer himself, about the ins and outs of testing and what it's like to spend part of your working week building your dreams, instead of someone else's. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode I chat with Adam Culp, founder of the Sunshine PHP, in sunny south Florida, about starting and running conferences, project estimates, and being professional developers. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode I have a fireside chat with sagely Rob Allen, about being one of the leads on the Slim 3 project, and about the constraints and decisions developers need to make. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode I have a fireside chat with the voice of Nomad PHP, Joe P. Ferguson. Joe shares how he got started as the voice of Nomad PHP. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode I have a fireside chat about all things TDD and testing with the sagely Mr Tom Oram, otherwise known as @tomphp. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode I have a fireside chat about what it's like to live the life of a developer evangelist with Jack Skinner, otherwise known as @developerjack, whilst he was at the first BuzzConf. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)

In this episode I have a fireside chat about a range of topics with Stephan Hochdoerfer. ★ Support this podcast ★By [email protected] (FreetheGeek.fm with Matthew Setter)