One of our recurring jobs at Tideways is to ensure that all of our instrumentation works with the new and upcoming PHP versions. For us, “working” doesn’t just mean that the results are correct, but that your PHP extension is fast, gathering insights for our customers with a minimal performance overhead.

Imagine you're at a buffet, eagerly approaching what you think is the dessert table, only to find an empty space where the chocolate cake should be. That disappointing moment? That's pretty much what happens in your code when you encounter the infamous "Cannot read properties of undefined" error. Just as you can't slice a piece of cake that isn't there, JavaScript can't read a property of an object that doesn't exist. But don't worry!

When developers build applications, they need to think about how they will connect their products to data sources. Direct database access vs. REST APIs: which should you pick? Both currently stand out as two of the most popular options. Let’s explore the pros and cons of each so you can determine whether API-led connectivity serves your needs.

What exactly comes to your mind when we say ‘Digital Advancements’? What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word? Is it cloud technology? Digital transformation? Gen-AI? Blockchain? Or everything that caters to Digital Transformation as a whole? We know that the last sentence is the one you’ll prefer. But has it ever come across your mind why digital transformation solutions are taking all the limelight from different industries?

As software systems grow more complex, ensuring reliable performance and delivering a seamless user experience becomes increasingly challenging. Product teams need the ability to track and analyze system behavior in real-time, allowing them to address issues before they affect users. Product observability offers a proactive approach, enabling teams to gather data, monitor system health, and make informed decisions based on a complete view of both infrastructure and user interactions.

The upcoming PHP 8.4 release will include the brand-new feature “property hooks”, a mechanism to add logic to a class property when read from or written to. One benefit of this feature is that you do not need to protect property access with a private property and public getter/setter methods anymore. You can find out how this feature works in the RFC and other places, but in the spirit of this blog we want to focus solely on the performance implications.

Introducing M2 Pro machine types— the latest addition to Bitrise's Apple Silicon offering. Choosing the right Apple Silicon Machine is essential to delivering value to customers when developing, releasing, and managing iOS apps. We are proud to be one of the first companies to offer our customers access to the latest and greatest machine, the M2 Pro.

Imagine you're a postal worker sorting through a mountain of packages. Some packages are ticking suspiciously, while others are leaking mysterious liquids. As a responsible postal worker, you have two choices: deal with these problematic packages yourself (throw) or slap a big "HANDLE WITH CARE" sticker on them and pass them along to the next person in line (throws). Think of throw as actually creating an error in your program. You use it when something goes wrong and you want to stop the program.

When building web applications, it's handy to break down a feature's complex processes into smaller, more manageable pieces, whether by using separate functions or classes. Doing this helps to keep the code clean, maintainable, and testable. An approach you can take to split out these smaller steps in your Laravel application is to use Laravel pipelines. Pipelines allow you to send data through multiple layers of logic before returning a result.

DreamFactory specialises in REST API generation for any number of database types however an underrepresented benefit is the ability to mount and manage any third party API via a HTTP service connector. This gives you the ability to generate documentation and secure an existing API as if it were created natively within DreamFactory.