Raspberry Pi, Arduino, BeagleBone, and similar technologies have had a revolutionary impact on so many people around the world.

Because they provide the building blocks of computing for a very low price, anyone, from a school student to a retiree, with a little bit of time and effort, can build a device that perfectly scratches whatever itch they have. They no longer need to wait for a commercial organisation to build it.

One such itch (at least one that I have) is to measure the current temperature and humidity throughout the rooms in my home. Sure, weather app's can tell you the current temperature and humidity, however, they can only do it for a wide geographical area.

So, in this tutorial, you're going to learn how to create a small weather station with a Raspberry Pi, some PHP and Python code, and a temperature and humidity sensor — for …

Today's fast-paced, digital economy has created a culture where people want to know how to compete in the global market, what skills are emerging, and how best to learn them.

Consequently, more and more people are choosing educational resources, such as ebooks and video tutorials, to help us fill the knowledge gap necessary to improve our lot in life.

And why not? Whether it's resume writing, DIY, or personal budgeting, there's a guru ready to take you from novice to ninja — "in just seven days!"

Forecast to be worth $350 Billion by 2025, the online learning industry has not only taken the world by storm, it has also created new opportunities for everyday people to become digital entrepreneurs.

With the abundance of e-commerce platforms, website builders, and content management systems readily available, just about anyone can launch a sales page and start selling e-courses or ebooks.

How does …

Welcome back! It’s been an amazing tour of planet TDD (Test Driven Development) so far. In this series, you’ve learned the benefits of TDD, and gotten your hands dirty building a P2P (Peer-to-peer) payment application.

Using Symfony and Codeception, you’ve worked through the Red-Green-Refactor cycle, gradually implementing new features via Sliming. You've also seen how TDD protects code from regressions.

In this, the third and final part in the series, you'll implement the last feature of the application using TDD, transaction history. In addition to that, you'll learn about the concept of test coverage and how it impacts application reliability.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial, you need the following things:

• A basic understanding of PHP and Symfony
• Composer globally installed
• Git
• PHP 7.4
• The Symfony CLI

Getting started

If you already have the code from the first part in this series, you can skip this section. However, …

For far too many years, PHP developers stored application credentials and secrets, such as usernames, passwords, and API keys, alongside their code.

While extremely convenient, this practice was a security nightmare just waiting to happen; if someone could access an application’s source code, they had access to all of its sensitive data too.

Nowadays, this practice is nowhere near as common as it once was. Rather, it's now incredibly common to store credentials separately from code in dotenv files (.env) which makes them available as environment variables.

However, while this is a significant improvement, this practice still isn't the best way to keep credentials and secrets secure. For example, if the .env file is accidentally committed to version control, then the credentials and secrets are once again stored alongside code.

Alternatively, if a malicious actor can access the environment where an application is running from, they can access …

Twilio Programmable Messaging lets you send SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp messages. However, up until recently, it didn't support scheduling messages for a future date and time. If you wanted to do that, you had to roll that functionality yourself, likely using a Cron job, or some scheduling tool, to retrieve stored messages from a database, and create them when they needed to be sent.

Now, though, you can schedule SMS messages with a single API call using Message Scheduling!

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to schedule SMS ahead of time using PHP. To make the tutorial a little more meaningful, assume that you are writing the code to help remind people about upcoming meetings of the local club that you're a member of.

Tutorial Requirements

You will need these items to follow along with this tutorial:

• PHP 7.4 (ideally 8.1)
• Composer installed globally
• A free or paid Twilio …

When it comes to blogging software, you're not starved for choice. However, despite this choice and how feature-rich modern blogging software is, are the available options necessarily the right choice?

Sure, software such as WordPress, Ghost, Gatsby, and Wix are very feature-rich — and their UIs are often very smooth. But do you want the hassle of installing, configuring, and securing them on top of writing your blog content? What's more, can you justify the budget that some blogging software requires?

Maybe, all you want to do is to write your site's content using your preferred editor, using a simple format designed for writing for the web, Markdown, rather than through a user interface.

If that’s the case, then in this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create a blog that draws its content from Markdown files. The blog uses the Slim Framework (version 4), the Standard PHP …

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a RESTful CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) API with Laravel that stores its data in a Firebase realtime database.

What is Firebase?

Google Firebase is a Google-backed application development platform that enables developers to develop iOS, Android, and Web-based applications. Firebase provides tools for tracking analytics, reporting and fixing app crashes, creating marketing and product experiments, and much more.

So, without wasting time, let us dive in.

Prerequisites

1. PHP 7.4, though ideally 8.1.
2. Composer installed globally.
3. jq.
4. Prior experience with Laravel.
5. A text editor such as Visual Studio Code or an IDE such as PhpStorm.
6. A Google account.

Install and set up the Laravel application

To begin, you first have to install a Laravel application and run it on your local development machine.

To do that, in your terminal, run the command …

For those times when all you need is a simple solution that enables you to write quick, yet powerful applications, Slim is a great contender amongst the myriad of available PHP frameworks.

At its core, Slim is a microframework designed to receive HTTP requests, route the requests to the relevant controllers, and return the corresponding HTTP responses.

Slim’s minimalist environment makes it ideal for the development of both microservices and APIs that consume, repurpose, or publish data.

In this tutorial, you’re going to learn how to create a RESTful API using Slim 4, PHP, and MySQL.

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial you will need the following:

• PHP 7.4. Ideally version 8.1.
• Composer installed globally.
• MySQL 8.
• Postman.

Let's create the API!

To begin, you need to create the project’s root directory, named customers-api. You can do this in your editor/IDE or by running the following commands on a …

As we all know, authentication is a very important aspect of building an application because you want to ensure that users can only access routes and information that they're allowed to.

Authentication takes many forms and a common one is tokenization which we will be focusing on in this tutorial.

Tokenization replaces a sensitive data element, for example, user information such as user id's, names, and emails, with a non-sensitive substitute, known as a token.

But how will issuing tokens be beneficial to multiple authentications? Well, since every user has a unique token, and they can be stored in separate database tables, the token can be queried across these tables to find a match, and based on which return a true, the route can be limited or opened for the user.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use multiple authentication providers in Lumen to limit access to routes, …