Black Lives Matter – Chris Shiflett

George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. So many others. Their murders are tragic, and racism toward Black people is as pervasive as it is horrible. We must do everything we can to eradicate it.

I have been silent these past couple of weeks, listening and reading and watching and learning, but I am inclined to agree with the sentiment expressed so eloquently by Desmond Tutu:

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

Remaining silent makes room for other voices, but it also supports the status quo. Each of us has a voice, and that voice can be more powerful to our own circles of influence — however small — than the voices of others, even if theirs are more eloquent, more refined, and more important.

Here are my thoughts.

Violence

It’s important to understand why people are angry. This Twitter thread provides some insight into the injustices that Black people face in America. This Twitter thread simply asks, “how old were you when a cop first pulled a gun on you?”

If you want to speak out against violence, make sure you heed the advice of Randall Telfer and get your priorities straight:

You keep saying, “it’s horrible that an innocent black man was killed, but destroying property has to stop.”

Try saying, “it’s horrible that property is being destroyed, but killing innocent black men has to stop.”

Police brutality and the leaders who are encouraging and glorifying violence deserve nothing but our strongest condemnation.

In short, if you’re angry at protestors, I encourage you to educate yourself on what is really happening and why.

What can you do?

I am so inspired by all of those who are protesting, risking their safety against the dual threats of police violence and COVID-19, but you don’t have to protest to make a difference. Whether it’s speaking to friends and family, donating money to bail funds, or committing to anti-racism, there ar

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PHP Internals News: Episode 56: Mixed Type v2 – Derick Rethans

PHP Internals News: Episode 56: Mixed Type v2

In this episode of “PHP Internals News” I chat with Dan Ackroyd (Twitter, GitHub) about the Mixed Type v2 RFC.

The RSS feed for this podcast is https://derickrethans.nl/feed-phpinternalsnews.xml, you can download this episode’s MP3 file, and it’s available on Spotify and iTunes. There is a dedicated website: https://phpinternals.news

Transcript

Derick Rethans 0:20

Weekly a podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 56. Today I’m talking with Dan Ackroyd about an RFC that he’s made together with Mate Kocsic it’s called the mixed type version two. Hello, Dan, would you please introduce yourself?

Dan Ackroyd 0:38

Hi Derick. So my name is Dan Ackroyd, also known as Dan Ack online. I maintain the PHP image extension. And I also contribute to PHP internals illegitimate by maintaining some documents that called the RFC codecs that are a set of notes of why certain ideas haven’t reached fruition in PHP core, and occasionally I help other people write RFCs.

Derick Rethans 1:04

Continuing with the improvement of PHP type system in the last few releases. And we’ve seen a few more things coming into PHP eight but union types. For a long time, there has been an issue with PHP’s internal functions that the type that a return cannot necessarily be represented in PHP type system because they do strange things. It is RFC building more on top of PHP’s type system. What is this is trying to solve?

Dan Ackroyd 1:29

There’s a couple of different problems that’s trying to solve. The one I care more about is userland code, I don’t actually contribute that much to internals code so I’m not that familiar with all the problems that has. The reason I got involved with doing the mixed RFC was: I had a library for validating parameters, and due to how that library needs to work the code passes user data around a lot internally, and then back out to whether libraries return the validators result. So I was upgrading that library to PHP 7.4, and that version introduced property types, which are very useful things. What I was finding was that I was going through the code, trying to add types everywhere occurred. And there’s a significant number of places where I just couldn’t add a type, because my code was holding user data that could be any other type. The mixed type had been discussed before, an idea that people kind of had been kicking around but it just never been really worked on. That was the motivation for me, I was having this problem where I couldn’t upgrade my library, as I wanted to, I kept forgetting has this bit of code here, been upgraded. And I just can’t add a type, or is it the case that I haven’t touched this bit of code yet. So coincidentally, I saw that Mate was also looking at picking up the RFC, and he had copied the version that Michael Moravec had been working on previously. I want as I mentioned earlier, I help people write RFCs is for a lot of people where English isn’t their first language, it’s a difficult thing to do writing technical documents in English. I also think that writing RCFs in general is slightly harder than people really anticipate. Each RFC needs to present clearly why something’s a problem, why the proposed solution would work, snd, at least to some extent why other solutions wouldn’t work. Looking at the text from the previous version I could see the tool though, I understood, all of the parts of that RFC, I don’t think that it made the case for why mixed was the right thing to do in a very clear way. So I spent some time working with Mate to redraft the RFC, discussing it between ourselves and going through a few of the smaller issues before presenting it to internals, for it to be officially discussed as an RFC.

Derick Rethans 3:51

Where does th

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Kindo Acquired by MyHeritage – Demian Turner

I didn’t get a chance yet to blog about our last TechCrunching, but Kindo, the startup I co-founded in March 2007, today announced its sale to MyHeritage, the biggest player in the family tree space.

Kindo is a PHP social net app built on the Seagull framework and other open source software.  At peak popularity our users were building 38k profiles/day and we acquired more than 1m profiles in our first 10 weeks.

Hats off to the Kindo team and to the Kindo devs who don’t appear in the TC photo.