If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed a fancy new banner image:

If you follow me on Twitter you've probably seen that I've recently joined Polywork - a new social network unlike any others.

Polywork has a unique concept - instead of focusing on just your personal or professional life, your profile focuses on highlighting you as a multi-faceted individual. There's no commenting, no competing for likes, no recruiters, no politics - just you and your story:

With the 2.0.0 stable release of league/commonmark scheduled for next month, I'm pleased to share that the first 2.0 beta releases are now available! Current users of this library are highly encouraged to test this new branch and provide feedback.

You can install the beta release via Composer:

Having issues hearing your squad? There's a strong chance your default communications device is not set to the right device in Windows' audio settings. This guide explains how to fix that.

I'm excited to share that version 1.6.0 of league/commonmark has been released! This will be the last minor release of the 1.x branch - all efforts will now be focused on wrapping up development of 2.0.0!

Please see https://commonmark.thephpleague.com/1.6/upgrading/ for important information about this release and the upcoming 2.0.0 version.

The PHP RFC for enumerations just passed a 44-7 vote to be accepted as a new feature in the upcoming PHP 8.1 release!

Enumerations, also known as "enums", are a special data type that can only contain specific, predefined (or "enumerated") values. They behave somewhat similar to constants, in that their names can be referenced in code, but they allow for stronger typing.

The classic use case illustrated by the RFC is of an enum that defines different suits of playing cards:

As a developer, I LOVE my geeky t-shirts and mugs, but it's hard to find quality products with designs I like.  I've therefore been hard at work these last few weekends putting together my new project: www.moderngeekware.com

PHP 8.0 has just been released! This new major version adds several significant features and improvements to the language like attributes, match expressions, Just-In-Time compilation (JIT), and much more!

Here's a brief guide on how to install PHP 8.0 on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X:

Although Composer 2 is mostly backward-compatible with projects using Composer 1, some users may need to continue using Composer 1 due to plugin incompatibilities. This article shows how to install both versions side-by-side.