Have you heard about levenshtein, glob or sun_info before? Turns out PHP has some pretty cool built-in functions that I barely knew. I actually have had the occasional use case for some of them, although I'll admit most of them are rather niche.

Despite that, I think it's nice that PHP has so many lesser known functions that just… work. I made a list of my favourites — can you think of any other?

On top of nice and niche functions, I've got a bunch of other exciting things to share with you today, but first let me say thank you to everyone who decided to help sponsor my blog and newsletter last week! Your contributions are making a huge difference and I wanted to explicitly mention that! Thanks 🙏

PhpStorm 2023.1 EAP

We've been working on 2023.1 for a while at JetBrains, and now the first EAP version has arrived! I think this is going to be a pretty cool update with built-in 3v4l support, shared indices for faster indexing, some actions being available while indexing, new UI improvements and much more.

You can read all about it in the blog post that my colleague Roman wrote.

On top of that, Roman and I sat together last week for our very first video edition of "PHP Annotated Monthly". We've got a lot of practicing and improving to do, but I'm already happy with the result, you can watch it here — let me know your thoughts!

Fonts matter

You might have read about my new experiment with very short videos in the last newsletter: I'm trying out converting some of my blog posts to videos. I released a new one last week, where I talked about how programming and typography go hand in hand.

If you can spare two minutes to watch it and share your thoughts, that would mean a lot to me: Fonts Matter — thanks!

Roundup

Lots of people have been writing lots of great stuff lately! So let's do another roundup:

• Readonly amendments RFC vote — This RFC actually has two features: one about allowing non-readonly classes to extend from readonly classes, and one about overwriting readonly properties while cloning. It looks like the first will fail, but the cloning one is very likely to succeed, which I'm really happy about!
• ChatGPT vs Google — Eric shares a quick thought about how ChatGPT made searching solutions much easier. I can't help but wonder how Google will adapt in the near future.
• Codesniffer in Laravel — A nice writeup by Paul on how you can set up codesniffer in Laravel projects to improve your code style even more.
• Preparing Your Room For Audio Recordings — This is an older post but it's so, so good. I know not all of you are into content creation, and even a smaller part is into audio recording, but I had to share it again. Definitely give it a read if you're doing anything with audio recording — thanks Simon!

That's all for now, thanks for reading, have a nice week!

Brent