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Articles
PHP internals, architecture, performance, and the trade-offs behind real-world engineering decisions.
RSS feedJuly 2026
Yippee-Ki-Yay: Building a Die Hard Roguelike in C
Learning C by building a Die Hard-inspired roguelike - splitting a reusable engine from the game, and getting fog of war right with brute-force Bresenham line-of-sight.
November 2025
How I Built a 65 Million Item Array in PHP... Kind Of
Why PHP arrays are secretly memory-hungry hash tables - and how I used FFI and C structs to fit 65 million items into memory anyway.
August 2024
Understanding Service Containers in PHP
How dependency injection containers store services, resolve their dependencies, and manage lifecycles - built up from scratch with a worked PHP-DI example.
March 2024
PSR-4 - Autoloader
How class autoloading actually works in PHP, and how to write a PSR-4 compliant autoloader yourself with spl_autoload_register - and when to just use Composer.
March 2024
Skinny Controllers, Fat Models
Keeping controllers lightweight by moving business logic out of them - what the rule buys you in testing and reuse, and where a service or domain layer fits instead.
March 2024
Simplify Your Build Process with Makefile
Turn scattered build commands into simple, standardised make targets - one clean, reusable entry point that works across languages and frameworks.
March 2024
Clean Architecture for PHP Applications
A multi-layered PHP architecture with Repository, Service, DTO, and Controller layers that keeps business logic clean, testable, and ready to scale.