Chris Tankersley

I'm Chris Tankersley

Software Engineer & Developer Advocate

While I primarily describe myself as a PHP Developer, I'm a polyglot developer, architect, and developer evangelist. I am the author of "Docker for Developers" and "The Dev Lead Trenches", and a speaker. I am also a core committee member of the PHP FIG.

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Prisma and SQLite DateTime Sucks

So for a while now I have been working on a new app for my Local Game Store for our Magic: The Gathering sessions. For this app, I decided to try out SvelteKit, a newer JavaScript framework that is meant to simply apps that need both front-end and back-end services. Yes, I could use something like Laravel or Vite and a custom backend, but after getting frustrated with React I decided to try out SvelteKit.

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git rebase Is Your Friend

Many people are familiar with the concept of Time Travel. Time Travel is a great storytelling trope, and is used for movies like "Back to the Future," books like "The Time Machine," and television shows like "Doctor Who." One common theme between all various retellings of time travel is that it is fraught with danger. In "Back to the Future" Marty has to be careful not to alter the past lest he disappear. The Terminator franchise sends robots back in time to make sure the robots do not rise to power. In the end, the warning is the same - altering the past can have grave consequences.

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The Contracts of Open Source

Many people do not realize how old the concept of open-source software is, or that that software basically started as a shared development experience. In the 1950s computers did not come with software for the most part. Developers would be forced to develop software for the platforms that they had access to. Since many of these early developers were introduced to computers during college, one of the few institutions that could afford even machines like the TX-0 or the A-2, the general ideas of academia bled into software development.

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The False Promise of LTS Releases

On August 30th, 2019, Sara Golemon (@saraMG) tweeted out that developers on PHP 7.2 should start planning on their upgrade path to 7.3 or 7.4 since it was about to go into "security-only" mode, which means only security-related patches would be issued for it. If you were on 7.1, it was about to be End-Of-Life'd, which means 7.1 will receive no further patches.

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