iBlog - Ilia Alshanetsky

Making ExcelBook::save() atomic is easy to describe.

Parse Malcolm X with almost any name splitter and you get a suffix.

ExcelBook::save() to a file:// path used to truncate your existing file before it finished writing the new one.

A while back a proposal landed on the PHP internals list: deprecate metaphone().

Here is a bug in a name-parsing library I use at work: // theiconic/name-parser $name = $parser->parse('Jane Doe DDS'); $name->getLastname(); // "Dds" $name->getMiddlename(); // "Doe" The dental credential is now her last name.

Update, June 21 2026.

Most libraries raise their minimum PHP version over time.

I generate a lot of UUIDs.

I've reached for igbinary on nearly every PHP project I've shipped in the last decade.

Couple of weeks ago I shipped fastchart 0.2.0 and wrote it up here.

// Before $payload = json_encode($response); $data = json_decode($input, true); $ok = json_validate($input); // After $payload = fastjson_encode($response); $data = fastjson_decode($input, true); $ok = fastjson_validate($input); That's the

(new FastChart\StockChart()) ->setSize(1200, 600) ->setTitle('AAPL last 90 days') ->setTheme(FastChart\Chart::THEME_DARK) ->setOhlcv($ohlcvRows) ->setMovingAverages([20, 50, 200]) ->setVolumePane(true) ->setCandleStyle(FastChar…

The launch post for php_clickhouse 0.6.0 covered the framing: native binary protocol, soft fork of the stalled SeasClick, modern ClickHouse types, 30-40% faster than HTTP at high throughput.

Anyone who's tried AI-assisted trading research has hit the same wall.

In 2005 I wrote a PHP binding for libstatgrab and pushed it to PECL.

I run a few projects that move a lot of data through ClickHouse.

Several of my projects do heavy markdown parsing.

PHP processes more Excel files than any language except maybe Python.

Every AI coding agent ships with the same problem: it knows syntax but not discipline.

In the PHP community, "persistent connections" are often treated like a dark art; powerful, but prone to blowing up in your face.