Joel Clermont

There are times you may want to update a single Composer package without updating everything in your project all at once. I’ve put together a few tips to keep in mind when using this workflow.

Are you comfortable with Forge and a VPS like Digital Ocean, but considering a move to AWS? While a lot is the same, there are some nuances to making the move. I’ll walk you through some common questions and share some tips on how to make the most of the new hosting environment.

Apologies in advance, dear RSS reader. I’ve migrated platforms and as a result, you may see a bunch of old posts in your feed. In exchange for this minor inconvenience, I have good news to report on the future of this blog.

From time to time, I see people lamenting how many sites are “stuck” on old versions of PHP. Other times, I see people dealing with poor (shared) hosting environments, manual deploys with FTP, no local testing environment, and so on. Instead of sitting back and shaking my head, I’ve decided to do something about it.

We’ve all heard the saying “practice makes perfect,” but how you practice and what you practice are critical to making it an effective practice session. Consider some tips from a recent “Learning how to Learn” newsletter.

Are you expecting too much from an author, speaker or teacher? Take charge of your own learning instead. Consider some tips from a recent “Learning how to Learn” newsletter.

Software developers are, by necessity, lifelong learners. We are constantly facing new challenges, new technologies, new methods of solving problems. But how can we make our learning more efficient? This is a question that I’ve been pondering for at least four years.

This year at That Conference, I presented one of the few talks on PHP. The title of the talk was “A modern approach to PHP development.” My goal was to expose both PHP and non-PHP developers to some more recent developments in the PHP ecosystem.

In yesterday’s post on Octopress, I briefly mentioned the Pygments lexer documentation. One of the things I found incredibly useful was understanding all the available lexers and which language code would invoke them. For example, let’s say you want to have a code block that highlights both PHP and HTML. How would you do this?

I recently moved my blog from WordPress to Octopress. The experience was painless and I wish I would have done it much earlier. One thing that puzzled me was how Octopress handled PHP syntax highlighting. It seemed that it would only work if every code block started with the opening <?php tag. I found this quite annoying, especially when I only want to show one line of code.