Inheritance is one of the primary tenets of object-oriented programming languages, but each language implements it at least slightly differently. I’m coming from a background in Python, and it took me a bit to understand the different ways objects can extend or inherit behavior in PHP. Here is what I…

Arrays in PHP…Because there are no hashes/dicts Say What Now? I’m brand new to PHP. Every other language I’ve worked in has had the concept of a hash/dictionary/object, separate from the concept of an array/list (though, yes, lots of names for the same general idea…I’m going to use the word dict going forward…

If you’re being blocked by Medium’s paywall, this article and all its links are also available here. I’ve been writing about (and working in) Django for almost five years now, and I’ve written a lot about specific pieces of implementation. But as I’m about to move into a new role…

Encryption is a huge part of modern software engineering. This is true both of data within our own systems, but also encryption of data we send or receive with network requests, to ensure the security of data in flight and the validity of data received from other services. Most modern…

I had never heard the word “idempotent” when I started at my first software job. I had a liberal arts education and had been working in nonprofit and school management before my career change. I suspect I’m not alone in this total lack of awareness of the concept! So let’s…

When many of us are first taught to program, we’re told something along the lines of “programming is a set of very specific instructions that a computer follows in a specific order.” And this is true, sort of. It’s true, but it’s incomplete. …

(+ some common gotchas!) — Overview I’m mot going to do a deep dive into cookies and their use in the web on the whole. If you think an introduction like that would help you understand this post better, here is one place you might start. The very high-level that will apply to what we’re going…

No matter how hard we try to get our data model correct (and even if we’ve done so!) sometimes by the time we need to use it, either for a public-facing API or an internal one, we need things to look a little different. …

Unless a website is static, it almost certainly connects to other cloud services such as databases or caches that are hosted on servers other than the ones on which main application is running. Connection strings are used to identify where to find the server running the service, what type of…