RSS Parrot

Generate an image of a stereotypical PHP developer

https://www.exakat.io/generate-an-image-of-a-stereotypical-php-developer/

Published: September 8, 2026 08:43

Generate an image of a stereotypical PHP developer That was a popular toot on Bluesky, by Justin Jackson. I thought it would be interesting to make it again, in 2026, so here we go.             ChatGPT in 2024 The original image, below, was produced on…

13 Modern PHP Tips & Tricks from 2015

https://www.exakat.io/13-modern-php-tips-tricks-from-2015/

Published: September 7, 2026 20:04

13 Modern PHP Tips & Tricks from 2015 PHP has undergone a massive transformation over the last decade. If you’re still writing PHP like it’s 2015, you’re missing out on massive performance gains, cleaner syntax, and better security. I ran into a nice blog…

Rebuilding Taipan! with an AI Pair Programmer in PHP

https://www.exakat.io/rebuilding-taipan-with-an-ai-pair-programmer-in-php/

Published: September 6, 2026 17:01

Rebuilding Taipan! with an AI Pair Programmer in PHP Taipan! was one of the games that hooked me on computers. My brother and I would play it on the Apple ][c bitmap font and the original’s line-drawing art still aren’t ported: a reminder that “faithful…

https://www.exakat.io/16376-2/

Published: September 4, 2026 10:08

I Have a Dream of a PHP Preprocessor What if PHP could be faster, stricter, and more expressive, without waiting for PHP 9? What if we could preprocess PHP code into something more optimized, more elegant, or even a completely new dialect? The name itself…

Recently updated PIE extensions #5 (since August 27th, 2026)

https://www.exakat.io/recently-updated-pie-extensions-5-since-august-27th-2026/

Published: September 3, 2026 15:01

Recently updated PIE extensions #5 (since August 27th, 2026) 27 PHP Pie extensions were updated. iliaal/mdparser (0.6.0): Native C CommonMark + GitHub Flavored Markdown parser for PHP, targeting CommonMark 0.31 + GFM. ~10-20x faster than pure-PHP parsers,…

Tree-sitter and PHP: Two Directions, Endless Possibilities

https://www.exakat.io/tree-sitter-and-php-two-directions-endless-possibilities/

Published: September 3, 2026 10:35

Tree-sitter and PHP: Two Directions, Endless Possibilities Tree-sitter is a very popular library in the computer ecosystem at large. It powers syntax highlighting in Neovim, structural search in VS Code, and a growing wave of static analysis tools,…

Adding the last types to PHP code in 2026

https://www.exakat.io/adding-the-last-types-to-php-code-in-2026/

Published: September 3, 2026 10:01

Adding the last types to PHP code 2026 update note: This is an update of the original 2022 article, with annotations added locally to flag what’s changed in the PHP language since: mainly PHP 8.4’s property hooks and asymmetric visibility, which give…

setlocale() and Its Six Personalities

https://www.exakat.io/setlocale-and-its-six-personalities/

Published: September 2, 2026 14:28

setlocale() and Its Six Personalities What does setlocale() actually do? It changes the date format, right? It’s a fair guess, and it’s wrong in an interesting way: setlocale() doesn’t touch one behavior, it touches six, and most of them have nothing to do…

The Clock That Cracks Passwords

https://www.exakat.io/the-clock-that-cracks-passwords/

Published: September 1, 2026 15:44

The Clock That Cracks Passwords To understand what is the clock that cracks passwords, let’s start with a quizz. Which security flaw does the following PHP login check contains? If you said “the password should be hashed with bcrypt”, you are right and you…

Blocking PHP Reverse Shells: A Config-First Guide

https://www.exakat.io/blocking-php-reverse-shells-a-config-first-guide/

Published: August 30, 2026 19:48

Blocking PHP Reverse Shells: A Config-First Guide Every PHP reverse shell floating around GitHub, pentestmonkey’s original and the forty-seven forks that added a banner and changed the default port, does the same three things. It opens an outbound socket,…