Its PHP Friday!
The PHP Friday Series

It is time once again for another PHP the Language playing card, the third of its kind. I really loved collecting trading cards way back when in my youth. So I decided that if PHP had a trading card game, perhaps the cards may look just like this. We honor our Baseball and Football heroes with collectible trading cards, lets do the same for our “PHP Heroes”. If there was such a thing as real cards, the people I create cards for are the ones I would try to track down and collect.

The PHP language has some excellent personalities backing it. One of the personalities that sticks out all the time to me is Terry Chay. I had heard his name originally as it was associated many times with Plaxo back when he still worked for them. But the first time I knew he was an Engineer I needed to keep an eye out for was when I heard about his OSCON presentation titled “The Underpants Gnomes Strategy Guide: An eCards Case Study”. Anybody with that kind of sense of humor is somebody worth listening to.

I am a subscriber of his blog and always look forward to his next post. His blog is always entertaining as he mixes in technical posts right along with everything else. He has a way with mixing in comical antics along with technical posts where he still comes across as an experienced developer, intelligent, and hilarious. You can tell that Terry is so passionate about what he does. These type of people are what make us and the PHP language itself so lucky to have.

Next planned PHP the Language Card: Ed “Funkatron” Finkler

“PHP the Language” Playing Cards Credits:
The overall card design is based off of the card playing game Magic the Gathering
“Poker” style cards have already been created – Check Them Out

Terry Chay Card Credits:
Original image located here: georges flicker

Terry Links From Card & Elsewhere:
http://terrychay.com/
http://terrychay.com/blog/

Its PHP Friday!
Long ago, when I was discovering the language of PHP, I was very interested in finding out the security issues that I may come across and things I can do to prevent them. There is a name that is basically synonymous with security in PHP, and that name is Chris Shiflett. Chris wrote the O’Reilly book “Essential PHP Security” in 2005 which is often referred to in many security articles and posts. Chris has also contributed to many other PHP publications.

One of his biggest contributions to the PHP community is the PHP Security Consortium that he founded. This Consortium houses many key projects including the highly recommended: “PHP Security Guide” free to download and a must read.

I want to close this by saying, if you choose to code a web language, you need to take responsibility and learn how to code securely. Nobody is incapable of mistakes, but you need to absolutely do your best to code secure applications. Security needs to take the front seat and always be in your mind when coding an application. The first step to preventing bad code is education. Read articles, books, and warnings. There are many very common mistakes that you can educate yourself on how to prevent.

“PHP the Language” Playing Cards Credits:
The overall card design is based off of the card playing game Magic the Gathering
“Poker” style cards have already been created – Check Them Out

Chris Shiflett Card Credits:
Original image located here: georges flicker
Chris quote found here: RioSec: Chris’s Quotes

Chris Links From Card & Elsewhere:
http://www.shiflett.org
http://www.phpsec.org
http://www.brainbulb.com
http://omniti.com/people/bios/chris_shiflett

Quick Bio:
PHP started out as a personal project of Rasmus Lerdorf. Originally called “Personal Home Page Tools”, PHP’s first 2 versions were authored by Rasmus. Future versions have been core developed by many, but of course Rasmus is still well involved in development and the community. He is currently employed by Yahoo, an extremely PHP friendly employer. This offers him much opportunity to still be quite active in all areas that are PHP. He is constantly invited to conferences around the world. I have read and heard many times, if you choose to code PHP, you need to know the name Rasmus Lerdorf. You need to know PHP’s history and you need to know the man who originally brought it to us.

Being extremely security savvy, Rasmus decided to point out a security flaw in every single Open Source CMS program when invited to speak at OSCMS 2007. In a recent podcast, I remember hearing Ed Finkler, a key php securing developer and member of the PHP Security Consortium, saying that he would never show code around Rasmus, too scared what Rasmus would point out. Rasmus will not hold himself back anywhere when he sees a insecure application, it could be mid-conference and he will out you. I really like this about him, doing all he can to improve PHP’s overall security. For instance, if he ever commented on this post, he would probably tell me to stop using Wordpress Wordpress is PHP based, but it has a wide and long history of bad coding and security flaws.

Rasmus was the first big name I heard in the PHP community when I started to get involved in it years ago. There are many big names now and loads of developers out there doing very important things, so I will be able to write many of these, but let us never forget this first one. Rasmus, the man who started it all! Thank you Rasmus!

Its PHP Friday!
The first here at my blog. In an effort to knock the dust off my blog, I wanted to create a standard that I will do my best to live by. Every Friday I will be posting some kind of PHP related post. It is only appropriate that the first PHP Friday post be on the first PHP developer. I have just been so incredibly busy working at work and home. However, what I am busy with is coding PHP. Because of this, I come across interesting PHP items all the time. As you know from my previous posts, the PHP movement and community means a lot to me. So I also have a lot of heroes in that community that I would like to write quick bios about and even create these silly cards for. Its been many years since, but as a young teen I was really into the card playing game “Magic the Gathering”. I thought these card layouts would be kind of a cool way to honor some of my PHP Heroes.

“PHP the Language” Playing Cards Credits:
The overall card design is based off of the card playing game Magic the Gathering
“Poker” style cards have already been created – Check Them Out

Rasmus Lerdorf Card Credits:
Original image located here: chrys flicker
Rasmus quote found here: Matt Wade Article

Rasmus Links From Card & Elsewhere:
http://www.lerdorf.com/
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/rlerdorf
http://toys.lerdorf.com/