A Day In The Life Of...

When Chrome introduced Manifest V3, ad blockers took the biggest hit.

Last night an AI saved my life.

I have always lived by the mantra “Make things work, make things right, make things fast”.

Elliptic curves often feel like mathematical magic.

For years I had a small private page on my machine with a bunch of hacky tools for day-to-day crypto work.

There is a lot going on in the world regarding age verification.

First of all, please understand that I’m someone who has a clear way of visualizing my thoughts, but struggles to communicate them verbally or through written text like posts.

Almost 40 years ago, in 1985, a game was released for the Commodore 64 called “Eindeloos” (“Endless”, in dutch).

Three months ago, I wrote a small story about being fed up with things and trying to do something about it.

This blogpost starts with me switching of my car radio, and ends with me writing a browser.

“That’s just like, your opinion, man” - the dude Here’s a list of 100 opinions I hold.

I’m full of ideas.

In the software development world, there are a lot of debates going on: tabs vs. spaces, vim vs. emacs, Linux vs. mac, and so on.

For a while now, I’m thinking about doing something with Unity to see how it works.

Sometimes, things aren’t faster because you think it is,.. but because you benchmarked them.

I’ve moved from a Macbook Pro to a Dell PS running Windows 10.

What if you can design an email system with a clean sheet.

More often than not, I’m using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as my “cloud”.

When asking people if they use Symfony’s autowiring functionality, an often heard excuse why people don’t use it is because of all the magic that is happening during autowiring.

Shower thought: What would it take to write your own GitHub clone?

If you are visiting pretty much any (random) PHP conference these days, you will hear a lot of talk about “rating talks on joind.in”.

As you might notice, i’ve switched my blogging engine from Wordpress to Jekyll.

In a new talk I’m currently presenting at conferences and meetups, I talk - amongst other things - about Benford’s law.

Here you are, developing your code based on the Symfony2 framework.

Take a variable, increment it with 1.

To actually use Symfony2 forms, all you need to do is read some documentation, a few blog posts and you’ll be up and running in a couple of minutes.

Do you have a toy PHP elephant?

Jelrik and I wanted to share something (I forgot what it was) during the PHPBenelux conference.

A really neat trick in the Symfony Security component is the fact that you can impersonate or “switch” users.

Don’t you hate it when you are stepping through your debugger during a Symfony application debug session, and all of a sudden it cannot find files anymore as Symfony uses code located in the bootstrap.php.cache instead of the actual Symfony component.

As a reminder (mostly for myself, but any googlers out there): After updating Leopard to OSX Mavericks (yes, I know it’s 2014!)

Once in a while I like diving into code and see how things work under the hood.

One of the “golden rules” of symfony2 is to never hardcode urls or paths inside your code or templates.

I know: free software comes with a price.

A small update on the blogpost about PHP’s internal function usages: https://www.adayinthelifeof.nl/2014/07/25/internal-php-function-usage/

On a project where I worked alongside @basdenooijer, we needed to do a quick performance-test on a server.

How many internal PHP functions (things like count(), strpos(), array_merge() etc), does PHP have?

There are a lot of tools out there which can help you as a developer / self-employed contractor.

PHPMagazin.de has published my presentation about the first few milliseconds of HTTPS.

A web application is not complete without an API nowadays.

Sometimes (or actually, a lot of the time), handling forms will go beyond the basics.

Solr is great for searching through a massive data collection in lots of different ways.

If everything goes according to plan (which never is the case), I’ll try and highlight some of the fascinating stuff that can be found inside the SPL.

Sometimes you are looking so hard for a solution, that you won’t even see them even if they punched you in the face.

If you do command line work under Linux, you probably are aware that when pressing <TAB> automatically completes your command, or give you options for it that are currently available.

Not all IDEs (actually, i haven’t seen even one IDE that does this), can run your unit-tests as soon as something changes.

As a proof of concept I wanted to see in how far I could decode some TLS data on the client side.

I really love the travis-ci and scrutinizer-ci combo.

In the current day and age, using a plain HTTPS connection might not be the most secure way to communicate anymore.

**January 1, ** This year will be different.