When it comes to socket programming with PHP, nearly all articles are about the Socket Extension, despite it’s the unfriendliest and most cumbersome way to work with Sockets in modern PHP. Let me introduce you to something, which apparently is pretty unknown among PHP programmers — Stream Sockets.

Recently I once again came across an article by Jeff Kreeftmeijer in which he explains how to host micro libraries just in one Github Gist. I instantly thought: “Does this work for PHP too?” and yes, thanks to Composer it works! So here is how to do it.

At work we use a lot of Grails plugins. Recently one of our most important Plugins broke functionality in our app in a minor release, does not tag the releases in the repository and doesn’t provide a upgrading document. This brought me to think a bit about how plugins should behave.

Ever worried that your scripts ain’t good Unix citizens? Here are some quick, practial recipes usable for everyday PHP Command Line scripting.

After not being satisfied with Ant, Phing and Pake — I’ve scratched my own itch and made Bob — a simple project automation tool.