When PHP 7 came up with strong types, I saw the light. I had the hope not to see anymore bugs and inconsistencies due to weak typing in PHP.

I remember reading some code and having no idea what could be the type of the variables I had in front of me. Can I use the return of this method as an int? A boolean? Will it create silent bugs and unexpected behaviors?

When I search and read code about time and date problems developers have, I noticed that a lot of people still use the old PHP functions like date(), time() or strtotime().

What about using the class DateTime instead?

DateTime can do all the usual date and time operations you could ask for, and even more. Using DateTime can save a lot of time when you have to do simple, or more complex operations on dates.

PhpStorm is my favorite IDE for coding in PHP: pretty stable, you can do a lot with it. A shed load of stuff in fact. Even coding!

The guys from Jetbrains tried to integrate every useful tools for a web developer in one software and, I have to say, it is pretty well done!

You can configure easily a debugger, using a terminal, sending requests to your remote or local databases. It has a very good GUI for Git and everything you expect to find in an IDE (auto completion, indexing…).

Many people might think that developers are asocial nerds. Their only interest is technology. They’re on this planet to produce the dreams of their managers.

Big surprise: this is not true.

A developer should primarily care about producing value, not code. Value for himself, value for the others, value for the clients or companies he works with.

What does producing value means, for a developer?

• Being aware about the business domain of the company he works with, to translate it correctly in software.
• Using his skills to be able to solve a wide range of problems. This doesn’t have to be related to technologies or even programming.
• Always trying to improve the quality of the codebase he works on. It has to work, being maintainable, understandable and scalable.
• Finding and designing solutions in a good amount of time.

That’s the mission of this blog: improving your value, for you to produce valuable solutions. In short, to become a good, well rounded, valuable developer, with more control and autonomy.