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March 17, 2023 Symfony Station Symfony and PHP highlights


This communiqué originally appeared on Symfony Station, your source for cutting-edge Symfony, PHP, and Cybersecurity news.

Welcome to this week's Symfony Station highlights. It's your review of the essential news in the Symfony and PHP development communities focusing on protecting democracy. We also cover the cybersecurity world and the Fediverse.

Please take your time and enjoy the items most relevant and valuable to you.

Thanks to Javier Eguiluz and Symfony for sharing our latest communiqué in their Week of Symfony.

My opinions will be in bold. And will often involve profanity.


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Symfony logo

Symfony


As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony. Highlight -> “This week, the upcoming Symfony 6.3 version added features to create targeted value resolvers, to allow you to select the parser used in DomCrawler component, to support autowiring services as closures using attributes
and to improve Serializer performance.“

A Week of Symfony #845 (6-12 March 2023)

Symfony announced:

SymfonyLive Berlin 2023 - SymfonyLive comes back to Germany on October 5-6!

SymfonyLive Paris 2023 - Only 7 days to go!

Blackfire has:

The Power of Blackfire Alerting

SymfonyCasts start its second API Platform course, and it covers security.

This week on SymfonyCasts


Featured Item


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The Guardian opines that artificial intelligence in its current form is based on the wholesale appropriation of existing culture, and the notion that it is actually intelligent could be actively dangerous.

The stupidity of AI

This Week


Stefano Alletti shares a:

Step-by-step Guide to use Auth0 with Symfony 6

Ozan Akman examines:

Programming paradigms: Which framework is better?

Jarosław Szutkowski explores:

Behat: The Easy and Effective Way to Write Acceptance Tests

Jérôme Tamarelle shares:

Rendering Twig templates in Storybook

Great stuff here.

Speaking of Twig, this is an interesting project from Wynton Franklin:

Building a Time Off System

CMSs


And speaking of Storybook, Diffy explores:

Drupal And Design Systems

Drupal shares:

Nominations are now open for the 2023 Aaron Winborn Award

And most importantly:

DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023 Schedule

Jacob Rockowitz explores:

Providing JSON:API and GraphQL support for the Schema.org Blueprints module

Specbee examines:

Mastering Drupal 9 Layout Builder: A Comprehensive Guide to Effortlessly Customize Your Website's Design

My recent article shared some critiques of Drupal’s development, but the work on the frontend is an exception. Great strides have been made in the last year to modernize it.

And this is an effort that is similar to the one I propose in my article:

The Drupal Association Supports ICFOSS/Zyxware Back-to-work Programme

Mike Herchel shares:

Creating Your First Single Directory Component within Drupal

And after automatic updates and starter themes, this is the most exciting development upcoming in Drupal 10.

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PHP

This Week


Jetbrains announces:

PhpStorm 2022.3.3 is now available

Regular readers know Jason Knight is one of my favorite writers and a kindred spirit.

He has this spectacularly entertaining case study:

New Client’s Website Had Some Interesting “Problems”

The WP Minute is:

Digging Into the WordPress Block Protocol Plugin

I love the Block Protocol initiative and hope it can integrate with Gutenberg as tightly as possible.

Jorge Castro looks at:

Using ORM in PHP without a framework

This got a lot of love on Mastodon this week.

Freek.dev has:

Discovering PHP's first-class callable syntax

Matt Glaman updates us on:

PHPStan's new @not-deprecated annotation

And Andy Blum has this nifty little tool:

PHP DateTime Cookbook

Ryan Chandler has this interesting article on Foreign Function Interface:

Blazingly Fast Markdown Parsing in PHP using FFI and Rust

One of my Mastodon buddies, Grant Horwood, explores:

writing command line scripts in php: part 5; styling output text

Nico Mercado looks at why WordPress is moving forward the way it is, and why it’s having success.

The elePHPant in the room: Wordpress

Code logo

Other


Please visit our Support Ukraine page to learn how you can help kick Russia out of Ukraine (eventually).

Cybersecurity/Privacy


Hacker News reports:

GoBruteforcer: New Golang-Based Malware Breaches Web Servers Via Brute-Force Attacks

Warning: AI-generated YouTube Video Tutorials Spreading Infostealer Malware

PCMag reports:

US Shuts Down 'Netwire' Malware That Posed as Legit Remote Admin Tool

Forbes reports:

GPT-4 Can’t Stop Helping Hackers Make Cybercriminal Tools

Don’t use autofill on your password manager—especially if it’s Bitwarden

This is good advice I was not familiar with.

More


SWYX says:

Preemptive Pluralization is (Probably) Not Evil

Tomasz Dobrowolski shares:

4 Crucial Skills Every Entry-Level Developer Needs but Doesn’t Have (And How You Can Learn Them…

Brain Schnee shows us:

How to Learn and Use TypeScript: A Comprehensive Beginner's Guide

David explains:

Why Svelte Outperforms React: A Deep Dive into Render Performance

Longtime readers know I hate React and love Svelte, so I dug this.

CatlinCodes explores:

One problem that is now solved by CSS Subgrid

And Servebolt shows us:

How To Profile SQL Queries for Better Performance

Fediverse


Wired reports:

Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone

C^nts gonna c^nt.

Johannes Ernst

Meta and ActivityPub

As we covered last week, the reaction to this news ranged from incredulous disbelief to horror.

TechCrunch reports:

WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires an ActivityPub plugin so blogs can join the Fediverse

Meanwhile, this news was met with joy and acclaim.

Here’s the official statement:

ActivityPub

Joe Lotter writes:

On POSSE and IndieWeb

Storybench has:

Adam Davidson talks Mastodon, @Journa.Host, and content moderation

If you think the Fediverse would be an interesting option to explore for your side projects, The FediForum is coming up

FediForum | Who's coming?

Here’s an example project from Veronica Berglyd Olsen:

Threaded Mastodon Comments

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

Do you own or work for an organization that would be interested in our promotion opportunities? Or supporting our journalistic efforts? If so, please get in touch with us. We’re in our infancy, so it’s extra economical. 😉

More importantly, if you are a Ukrainian company with coding-related products, we can offer free promotion on our Support Ukraine page. Or, if you know of one, get in touch.

Keep coding Symfonistas!

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##Author

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###Reuben Walker

Founder

Symfony Station