After using phpbrew to manage my local PHP versions for a while, I got tired of re-compiling PHP after every release and decided to install multiple PHP versions side-by-side with Ondřej Surý's PPA. One of the features I missed from phpbrew was the ability to run a command like phpbrew use php-7.2.8 to automatically change the php command to that version, so I ended up implementing this feature myself using symlinks and shell aliases.

As you may know, Git is not a single application, but rather a toolkit containing many small programs and scripts that can manipulate the repository. This makes it trivial to chain those components into more-powerful, custom commands which can be defined as git aliases.

Here are some of the more-useful aliases I use on a daily basis:

I recently upgraded my system from Ubuntu 16.04 with Unity to Ubuntu 17.10 with Gnome Shell 3. One of the "features" I found annoying was that my IDE PhpStorm was not popping to the front and receiving focus whenever breakpoints were hit. I eventually figured out a solution and wanted to document it in case others were also searching for a solution.

I first confirmed that "Focus application on breakpoint" was indeed enabled in my settings:

Back in November I released colinodell/json5 - a JSON5 parser for PHP. It's essentially a drop-in replacement for PHP's json_decode() function, but it allows things like comments, trailing commas, and more.

Fast forward to this weekend when I received the following bug report from a user named Antonio:

league/commonmark is wrapping up 2017 with the release of version 0.17!

Changes include:

• Minimum PHP version bumped to 5.6
• New "max_nesting_level" setting
• A few performance optimizations
• Clean up deprecations and not-so-great code

For more info, check out:

Magento has just released the SUPEE-10415 security patch for the following versions:

• Magento Commerce 1.9.0.0-1.14.3.7 (formerly known as Enterprise Edition)
• Magento Open Source 1.5.0.0-1.9.3.7 (formerly known as Community Edition)

The patch contains fixed for several security vulnerabilities including cross-site request forgery (CSRF), Denial-of-Service (DoS), and authenticated Admin user remote code execution (RCE).

This weekend I released an open-source JSON5 parser for PHP!

JSON5 is a JS-compatible extension to JSON which allows comments, trailing commas, single-quoted strings, and more:

I recently came across this really helpful PHP trick:

You can cast a numeric string to either int or float, depending on its contents, by simply adding 0:

var_dump("1" + 0);
// int(1)

var_dump("1." + 0);
// float(1)

var_dump("1.0" + 0);
// float(1)

var_dump("1.5" + 0);
// float(1.5)

That's much cleaner than trying to make a conditional cast yourself:

Several months ago I blogged about compiling open-zwave for Home Assistant 0.45 on Docker. There were two reasons I did this: