Presented by Cal Evans

May 21, 2020

The ElePHPant has yet again learned some new tricks. PHP 7.4 is out and chocked full of new tools for developers to use.

Let’s take a quick look at some of these new tools that the core developers have given us in the PHP 7.x branch. We will see how we as developers can use them, and how they can make our code better/faster.

Oh and we’ll talk a little about PHP 8 too!

About Cal

Many moons ago, at the tender age of 14, Cal touched his first computer. (We’re using the term “computer” loosely here, it was a TRS-80 Model 1) Since then his life has never been the same. He graduated from TRS-80s to Commodores and eventually to IBM PCs.For the past 15 years Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux, OSX, and Windows. He has built a variety of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications.

When not banging his head on his monitor, attempting a blood sacrifice to get a particular piece of code working, he enjoys building and managing development teams using his widely imitated but never patented management style of “management by wandering around”.

These days, when not working with PHP, Cal can be found working on a variety of projects like Day Camp 4 Developers. He gives motivational talks to developers around the world. If you happen to meet him at a conference, don’t be afraid to buy him a shot of Rum.

Cal is based in West Palm Beach, FL – US where he is happily married to wife 1.36, the lovely and talented Kathy. Together they have 2 wonderful kids who were both smart enough not to pursue a job in IT.

Tags: php,php7,php8,errors,just,in,time,jit,compiler,exceptions