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PHP 7 and 8 are huge leaps forward for the language. Gone are the days of hacking together an entire web application in a single file (although you can technically still do that, if you're feeling retro). Now there are so many fancy new language features that you might find yourself adrift in the sea of changes.

I'd like to introduce some of these new features one at a time, to give them a chance to catch your attention and capture your imagination.

Today's subject: the Null Coalesce operator, a little ditty from PHP 7.0 that looks like ??.

Way back in 2011, I created Beryllium\CacheBundle for Symfony 2. It got a bit of traction, but superior options soon appeared, and then PSR-6 landed and promised a whole new world of caching. PSRs, or "PHP Standard Recommendations", are a group of framework interoperability interfaces provided by the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (FIG).

I wasn't exactly a fan of PSR-6.

The PSR was well-engineered, but it seemed like overkill for my projects. And on top of that, I was no longer working on the project that had needed caching in the first place.

Ever wondered about a day in the life of a remote worker?

I've been a remote software developer for 3+ years, and most days I just sit at my desk at home and get stuff done.

Every once in a great while, though, I venture out into the world. Some days it's just for lunch. Some days it's a short photo walk to brighten up my day. But on some rare days ... I get a bit more adventurous.

This YouTube video is from just such a day:

The Adventure

It was a calm spring day, so I packed up my crab fishing gear and headed to Pedder Bay, a local marina that offers affordable hourly boat rentals.

I rented a sixteen foot "Double Eagle" with a 50 horsepower Yamaha motor.

Soon after exiting the marina, I put my crab trap in the water near some other traps. In the video, I joke that the footage was "not found" - really, it just wasn't possible (or safe) to capture footage and put the trap in the water at the same time. The line I was using also got tangled up as I was dropping the trap, so I had to spend some time un-knotting it.

With PHP's recent focus on stricter type handling comes some new terminology that might be intimidating to some and confusing to others.

Two new terms, "contravariant parameters" and "covariant returns", describe how derived classes and interface implementations can widen and narrow the declared types of their parent interface or class.

Back in the code-slinging, devil-may-care olden days of PHP (up to version 4), we didn't have to worry about this stuff, because the language's loosey-goosey typing "solved" it for us. We could come up with any horrendously tangled mess we wanted to.

But now, PHP is growing up. It has Opinions™. And those opinions mean that more care needs to be taken when smashing rocks together to craft our classes.