PHP & Web Development Blogs

Your biggest asset is also your biggest risk... your developers

Your business thrives because of the incredible work and innovation of your developers. With simple keystrokes your developers can completely transform your business, add new features, and drive new sales.

But those same keystrokes can take down production, create security back doors, and put your business at risk. That's why it's more important than ever for your team members to be up to speed with the latest technology, especially around performance and security.

Of course, some things are easier said than done - after all everyone is super busy these days. So how can you help keep your team members learning, and putting your business first in the process?

Conference Parties

There's nothing better than attending a PHP or programming conference in person - the chance to meet speakers face to face, to network, the knowledge, and the hallway track. However, many companies aren't able to afford multiple (or even one) conference for their developers - especially ones that require airfare and hotel.

However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't still participate in these conferences. The good news is that roughly once a quarter Nomad PHP streams talks from a conference right to your computer. This means that your team members can all participate in a multi-day conference from the comfort of your office (or their home) - and you can provide this for your team for less than the cost of a single conference ticket!

Make the conference party even more special by providing lunch during the lunch break, bringing in party gifts, having give-aways during the conference, and planning activities during longer breaks for your team.

Since many conferences take place on Friday, not only are you providing invaluable training and an incredible work benefit, but ending the week on a super positive note that your team members will appreciate (and your risk assessment teams will greatly appreciate as new security practices and compliance practices are put into place).

Monthly Lunch and Learns

Every month Nomad PHP offers live virtual talks by the industry's top experts. With talks at 11am Pacific, and 6pm Pacific it's a perfect time to grab a conference room and order a couple pizzas for lunch (or if Eastern, grab some snacks and maybe a beer) and play the monthly meeting on the large screen.

Your team members will have the opportunity to take notes, discuss with each other, and perhaps most importantly ask the speaker real-world questions that directly impact your business, providing tangible solutions to the problems they are facing.

And since every Nomad PHP Pro meeting is recorded, your team members can refer back to the video at any time, watching sections relevant to them or digging in for more information.

Developer Book Club

Encourage your team members to share what they're learning with others, and help build each other up. Not only are you helping grow skills and ensure your team is following the latest best practices, but you're also fostering a mentor-mentality within your team - where each team member feels invested in the growth of other members.

With Nomad PHP you receive a new issue of [php[architect]](/books) each month and have several additional books available to read on demand - providing the latest updates and an invaluable resource to help your book club get started.

Developer Movie Nights

Sometimes we all just want to get away, grab some popcorn, and watch a movie. Similar to lunch and learns, give your developers a night or two where they can get together and watch one of the 250+ training videos available on Nomad PHP. You can even make it a movie marathon!

Whether it's pizza, popcorn, sodas, beers - your team members will have the chance to kick back, relax a bit, build team camaraderie, and learn valuable skills to help your business succeed. Essentially, turning a training day into a fun team-bonding activity.

Learning Path Challenges

Every company has challenges, and areas they need their team members to master. Whether it's DevOps and containerization, security, performance, management, modernization, or soft skills - work with your team to determine what skills will help them succeed and work with your team members to put together video learning paths.

Your team members can watch through these videos on-demand, go back and replay to refresh their knowledge, and work their way towards mastery in the subjects that will help your company succeed.

Certification

Show that you are invested in your developers by helping them earn Professional Certification. These certifications demonstrate that your team members have a fundamental grasp of the technology they are working with and understand when and how to use this technology.

With free certification exams included with Nomad PHP - you no longer have to worry about failed exams or expensive test credits. Your team members can take the exams at their own pace, discover the areas they need to improve, and take the exam again when they are ready. After all, shouldn't the goal of certification be to help your developers learn these skills and prove their expertise?

You can go even further with certifications by having a special company award, framing their certificate, or calling out newly certified developers at team meetings or all-hands.

Learning Incentives/ Rewards

Of course there are even more ways you can help your developers learn new skills, grow their careers, and build loyalty within your company. With Nomad PHP there are numerous ways for your team members to grow their skills, and numerous ways you can reward/ incentivize them - from rewards for the most active learner, to setting goals for learning new skills, to obtaining certifications, to attending streams, to watching videos on-demand. All of these are included with our Professional Nomad PHP Team subscriptions.

Want to learn more about getting a Nomad Team Subscription for your developers? Give us a call (844) CODE-PHP

Have more ideas on how to help your developers grow their skills or help employers make education more accessible? Please leave your ideas in the comments below!

To say that we have been hard at work here at Nomad PHP, or that I'm excited about these three announcements would be a tremendous understatement. Over the past several months, behind the scenes, we've been working to bring even more features and benefits to Nomad PHP - these have already included unlimited streaming of all past meetings and access to PHP Architect.

Available today, however, you'll also have access to online, live workshops - as well as soon have the ability to stream select PHP conferences live, and finally to prove the knowledge you have gained through our online certification.

Online, Live Workshops

Like our online meetings, we are excited to announce that available today you can participate in online, live, and interactive workshops. Our first workshop will feature Michael Stowe, author of Undisturbed REST: a guide to Designing the Perfect API as he demonstrates how to build the perfect API using modern technologies and techniques.

Additional workshops will be announced as we continue, with a minimum of one workshop per quarter. These workshops will be part of your Nomad PHP subscription, and will be recorded for later viewing.

Nomad PHP Certification

With the many changes impacting the PHP ecosystem, we're proud to announce the ability to prove your knowledge with our online certification. Each certification is made up numerous, randomly selected questions to be completed within a specific time frame. Depending on the exam it may or may not be proctored, but all exams monitor user activity to ensure compliance.

To pass the exam, a passing grade (specified on each exam) must be completed for each section within the allotted time frame. Failure to complete or pass any section will result in a failing grade for the entire exam.

Upon completion, you will receive a digital certification with verification to post on LinkedIn or your website, as well as having your Nomad PHP updated to show the passed certification.

Initial certification exams will include PHP Developer Level I, PHP Engineer Level II, and API Specialist Level I. The PHP Developer exam will cover core components of PHP, the Engineer will cover a broad spectrum of topics including modern technologies, and the API Specialist will cover REST design and architecture practices.

All three exams will be available by January 31, 2019, and will be included with a Nomad PHP subscription.

Stream Select PHP Conferences Live

One of the primary goals of Nomad PHP is to bring the community together, and allow users all over the country to participate in conference level talks. What better way to do this than to bring community conferences online?

Like our traditional talks, these conferences and select conference sessions will be live-streamed as part of your Nomad PHP subscription, allowing you to participate in real-time with in-person conference attendees.

The first conference to be streamed will be DayCamp4Developers: Beyond Performance on January 18, 2018. Additional conferences to be streamed will be announced shortly.

Community and Corporate Sponsorships

With these new additions to Nomad PHP, now is the perfect time to take advantage of our new Community and Corporate sponsorships.

Your support of Nomad PHP not only makes all the above possible, but allows Nomad PHP to continue to serve and give back the community. We're proud, that despite operating at a loss, to have already contributed over$4,000 to the PHP community in the last 5 months.

To learn more about the sponsorship and community opportunities we have available, please visit our Advertising section.

Other Ways to Support Nomad PHP

Of course, while financial support helps us keep afloat and do more for the community, there are even more, and just as important ways to support Nomad PHP. Please consider linking to Nomad PHP, or sharing the service with your friends.

With the mission of making technology more accessible, I'm pleased to announce a beta of transcriptions and closed captioning on select videos.

This beta offers a more in-depth look into videos before watching them, the ability to dig into the video's text afterwards for review, and the ability to watch the video with closed captioning assistance.

Closed Captioning may be enabled on the video player by clicking the [cc] icon and selecting your preferred language (at this time, only English is supported). You may also find a transcription of the talk below the description for more insight into the talk before watching, or to find specific information/ sections afterwards for review.



As our first attempt at transcriptions and closed captions, it won't be perfect, but if it is beneficial this is something we hope to bring to all future videos, and selectively add closed captioning to past videos based on demand and availability.

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Today the following videos are available to watch with closed captioning:

* Data Lakes in AWS
* The Dark Corners of the SPL
* Git Legit
* Advanced WordPress Plugin Creation
* The Faster Web Meets Lean and Mean PHP

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Closed Captioning for Live Events

Unfortunately, at this time we are not able to offer closed captioning for live events including our monthly meetings, workshops, and streamed conferences. This is an area we are continuing to look into, and working on identifying partners to make possible in the future.

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Providing Feedback/ Requesting Closed Captioning

If you have a specific request for a video you would like to see closed captioned, please let us know using the Nomad PHP feedback form.

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Next on the Roadmap

Also look for these new features coming over the next several months:
* Lightning talks
* Team management for team account owners
* Mobile Apps for Android/ iOS with offline viewing

PHP, by all means, is an immensely powerful language!



We may fall short of words, but there won't come any end to its qualities. The endless functionalities and possibilities of this server-side scripting language have managed to get it a strong and supportive community of PHP programmers on a global level. At present, PHP powers more than half on websites and applications on the internet.


Do you know what makes PHP so praiseworthy?



It is the simplicity, easy programming structure, and developer-friendly web functionalities that are to be credited to turn PHP into one of the top programming languages. You can create highly interactive and dynamic websites and applications with desired results by making use of PHP.



However, coding often could be a tough and tedious task to accomplish. As a solution to this, you get built-in PHP libraries that optimize the process of coding for maximum productivity.

But what are these libraries?

That's exactly what you will find out as you move ahead in this article, a list of top 12 PHP libraries capable of leading the development process in an intended manner.



So, without waiting any further, let's move ahead to learn about PHP libraries in-depth.

PChart

PChart is a PHP library assisting with the generation of text data in the form of something more appealing to the eyes and known as visual charts.



You can use this library to represent data as bar charts, pie charts, and many more different formats. The PHP script here utilizes SQL queries to put data in the impressive charts or graphs form.

Mink

Another well-known in the list of PHP libraries is Mink. It allows you to keep an eye on if a proper interaction is happening between your web apps and the browser. Eliminating the API differences between the two types of browser emulators, Mink offers an authentic testing environment for you. It also supports PHPUnit, Behat, and Symfony2.

Monolog

Monolog is a PHP logging library that helps you with saving logs to the specified locations by sending them to set files, sockets, inboxes, databases, or other web services. The use of the PSR-3 interface permits to type-hint logs in counter to your libraries that maintain optimum interoperability.

Hoa

This modular, extensible, and structured set of PHP libraries we know as Hoa establishes a link between the research and the industry.



It recommends essential paradigms, mechanisms, and algorithms for building the reliability of a site. Many PHP developers in different parts of the world use Hoa for ideal PHP development.

Guzzle

Guzzle is an HTTP client library for PHP that enables you to send HTTP requests to combine with web services.



It offers a simple interface that makes the development of query strings, POST requests, HTTP cookies, and many other attributes possible. You can also use Guzzle to send synchronous and asynchronous requests from the similar interface.

Ratchet

If your need is to develop real-time, two-directional apps between clients and servers over WebSockets, Ratchet is the PHP library you need to do it effectively.



Creating event-driven apps with Ratchet is a rapid, simple, and easy job to do!

Geocoder

Geocoder is a library to create applications that are very well geo-aware.



With Geocoder, there is an abstraction layer that helps with geocoding manipulations.



It is further split into two parts, known as HttpAdapter and Provider.

ImageWorkshop

ImageWorkshop is an open-source PHP library letting you work over the manipulation of images with layers. You can crop, resize, add watermarks, create thumbnails, and so much more. You can also enhance the images on the sites.

PhpThumb

phpThumb is the library specialized at handling the work associated with creating thumbnails with minimal coding. Accepting every image source type and image formats, it makes you do a lot ranging from rotating or cropping to watermarking or defining the image quality.

Parody

This simple library we know as Parody is used to copy classes and objects. It also provides results for method calls, acquiring properties, instantiating objects, and more. Sequential method chaining is used by Parody to produce defining class structures.

Imagine

This object-oriented PHP library is meant for working with images along with manipulating them. The often adopted operations such as resizing, cropping, and applying filters happen instantly and relatively well with Imagine.



With Imagine, you get a color class that forms the RGB values of any given color. Draw shapes like arc, ellipse, line, etc. with the features available.

PhpFastCache

PhpFastCache is an open-source PHP library that makes caching feasible. Coming as a single-file, it can be integrated within a matter of minutes.



Caching methods supported by PhpFastCache involve apc, memcache, memcached, wincache, pdo, and mpdo.


The Bottom Line




It's not about what extra difference these libraries make; it's about what significant individual contributions these libraries make for a final desired PHP app or website.



A PHP programmer, too, agrees with these libraries' benefits.



It's your time now to try and believe!

A brief (by Mike's standards) note

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them. - John F. Kennedy

I wanted to take a brief moment to express my gratitude this holiday season. First and foremost, a huge thank you to the beautiful Tanja Hoefler who has put in countless hours behind the scenes of Nomad PHP, ranging from finding the best articles and tweeting them out, to tracking down great speakers, to countless hours of video editing (including fixing all my mistakes from the live broadcast).

Thank you to our Founders

I also need to thank Cal and Kathy Evans, an amazing husband and wife team who have done so much for the community over many, many years - including founding and being an invaluable source as Tanja and I took over Nomad PHP. They are truly an inspiration for Tanja and myself, and I hope some day we can do as much for the community as they have.

Thank you to our Speakers

And I need to express my gratitude to our amazing speakers who spend countless hours preparing their presentations, and even stay up all night practicing or get up at 5am to be ready to share their knowledge with the community.

Thank you to our Advisors

Another special shout out goes to Eric Poe, Eric Hogue, and Andrew Caya who have all been tremendous advocates of Nomad PHP, as well as the foundation of our meetings. Their feedback, along with our amazing Advisory Board has helped shake the direction of Nomad PHP, and the many great things we hope to do in the future.

Thank you to our Sponsors

Which brings me to our sponsors. As we try to grow and expand Nomad PHP, as well as bring in more resources and make it more valuable (and affordable), we have done so at a fairly significant loss. That's ok, as that was the plan for 2018, but companies likeRingCentral,Twilio,Auth0, andOSMI have played a critical role in letting us move forward and keeping that loss manageable. Without them, I'm not sure we would be able to be offering the service we do, or have the plans we do for 2019!

*On a side note, if you're not familiar with OSMI, they're a GREAT non-profit who has done so much good in the tech space raising awareness about mental health, and educating employers - I highly recommend supporting this great non-profit organization.*

Thank you to our Family and Friends

Of course, I need to thank my family, my friends, and all those who have supported myself, Tanja, and Nomad PHP over the years.

Thank YOU

Least, but certainly not last - in fact perhaps most important of all - I want to thank the tremendous Nomad PHP community - over 3,000 members strong - that make Nomad PHP what it is. Without you, Nomad PHP wouldn't exist - it wouldn't need to. Andwithout you, and the greater PHP community, I wouldn't be here today, doing what I love to do.

For those that do not know my story, I grew up in medicine - becoming a first responder and pursuing a career as a lifeflight paramedic (helicopter ambulance) before realizing two things... ok three: I had a tremedous fear of heights, I hated needles, and I loved programming.

Leaving the nursing program left me unsure of what to do next, so I did what I loved - programming - where the number of mistakes I made I'm sure outnumbered the lines of good code. If it wasn't for the community being so patient, so encouraging, and helping me grow - I'm not sure what I would be doing today, but it certainly wouldn't involve PHP, Developer Relations, Nomad PHP, or the community.

So for that I want to say one final thank you - a thank you for giving me the gift to do what I love, and the opportunity to hopefully pay this forward, and give back to the community, helping others do the same.

Next year will be an amazing one for Nomad PHP, but I can't thank you all for how incredible and amazing these few short months in 2018 have been - because without you, there would be no 2019.

Have a very wonderful Thanksgiving,

Mike

***PS - want to support our 2019 initiatives and be recognized on Nomad PHP in the process? Become a Supporter.***