Hi

A little more than a week ago, I gave a talk about generics in PHP: what are they, how are they helpful, and why don't we have them??? The people watching live seemed to appreciate the topic, so I decided to publish a recorded version of that talk on my YouTube channel as well. You can take a look here, it's about 20 minutes long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtmRG5lCENA.

Speaking of that YouTube channel: it's been almost a year since I rebranded what used to be my personal channel to PHP Annotated, and started working on it as my daytime job as a developer advocate for PHP at JetBrains. So, it was a good time to take a look at how the channel has been doing over the past year. I'm pretty happy with the results: we've hit the 10k subscriber milestone a couple of months ago, and now we're heading for 20k! I hope to reach that next milestone somewhere within the next 6 months, so if you're on YouTube and want to help out? You know what to do 😉

Next thing I wanted to mention is that I closed off my newsletter subscription form. I kept having to deal with fake accounts subscribing, and it didn't really help my email reputation when it came to spam filtering. So, instead of public subscriptions, people should now mail me personally in order to subscribe. I hope that'll help in the long run. In the event that any of my emails end up in your spam folder, I'd highly appreciate it if you'd mark it "not spam", and let me know by replying. I'm doing all I can to improve spam issues, but, as it turns out, email is hard 😓

Finally, I wanted to mention a weekend project of mine: I've been building a game! This time not to make it into an educational video like I've done in the past, but simply because I felt like doing it. It's nice being able to occasionally code on a hobby project, without needing to think about how to transform it into a video or livestream. And that's what this project is about: it's a 2D dungeon crawler-style, deck building game. And I love working on it and playing it! I'm actually nearing a stage where I want to invite people to play test and give feedback. So, if you're in these kinds of games: let me know by replying to this email 😃 Here's a little teaser image, just to give you an impression (work in progress, of course):

That's about all I wanted to share with you today, have a great week!

Brent