After covering Vue.js in September, it is time for React – currently the most popular frontend library for building interactive UIs. React thinks differently from Vue: everything is a function, state flows one way, and JSX looks like HTML in JavaScript. I show the fundamentals from a PHP developer’s perspective and compare the two approaches.
BFS and DFS are fundamental graph traversal algorithms. They appear in unexpected places in web development: finding the shortest path between categories in a tree, detecting circular dependencies between modules, or checking if two nodes in a social graph are connected. I implement both in PHP with practical examples.
Magento 2’s cron system is responsible for dozens of background tasks – reindexing, sending emails, cleaning cache, synchronising with external systems. Writing your own cron job is straightforward, but understanding groups, scheduling, and how to debug when a job is not running saves hours. I show the complete picture.
The Command pattern encapsulates an operation as an object. This sounds abstract until you see the concrete benefits: undo/redo, operation queuing, logging, retry logic – all flow naturally from treating commands as first-class objects. I show the classic GoF implementation, CommandBus, and integration with the Magento 2 message queue.
REST API design is one of those topics where everyone has an opinion but few have a consistent set of rules. Resources vs actions, the right HTTP status codes, response structure, versioning – decisions made here stay with the API for years. I show the principles I follow when designing REST APIs in PHP projects and Magento 2 modules.
Unit testing in PHP projects is a topic most developers know in theory but keep putting off until “when there is time”. The time never comes. I show how to get started with PHPUnit, how to write tests that actually check something meaningful, and how to mock dependencies – with examples that look like real production code.
Symfony is not just a framework – it is a set of independent PHP components you can use separately in any project. Magento 2 itself uses them (Console, Filesystem, Serializer). I show a few components that genuinely help in everyday PHP and Magento work: Console for writing CLI commands, Validator for validating data, and HttpClient for communicating with external APIs.
PHP 8.0 was officially released on 26 November 2020. I wrote about the previews in July – now that I have the final version, it is time for first practical impressions. I check what works as promised, what surprised me, and what to watch out for when migrating older projects.
Magento’s built-in Full Page Cache stores pages in files or Redis. It works, but it handles requests inside PHP – nginx and PHP-FPM still have to start for every request. Varnish sits in front of nginx and serves pages from memory without touching PHP. For a shop with traffic that is the difference between a second and milliseconds.
As a PHP developer you have probably had some contact with jQuery and maybe a bit of plain JS. Vue.js is the next step – a reactive framework that increasingly appears in e-commerce projects as a frontend layer for headless Magento or as a replacement for the older knockout.js. I show the basics from the perspective of someone who thinks in PHP day to day.