Category Archives: Allgemein

Keeping timezone data current

Allgemein, DateTime, DevOps,

On 1st of November 2026 several canadian provinces will not fall back to standard time from DST. They decided at several different points in time that they will not do so.

British Columbia did so in March already whereas Alberta decided so in June, the Northwest Territories in August and Manitoba in September.

As is the usual process shortly after the decission was made, there was a new version of the timezone-database released so that the information is available only with a short delay to everyone that needs it.

Who needs that? Well… That database is on every computer whether Linux, Windows or MacOS, on every mobile device from Android to iOS and on every Smartwatch out there. In every GPS in your car, yacht or plane. More or less in any electronic device that keeps track of time. So yes! Your smart-fridge might also be running it.

I was now recently challenged to do some updates of data that was converted wrongly based on the information in the old versions of the database and to convert it to the new version of the database (I have written why it is a bad idea to do that previously)

Only to end up in its own kind of hell.

It all started with something that I realized quite some time back: The International Components for Internationalization – in Short ICU – ship with their own version of the timezone database. And the ICU version in some linux-distributions is notorioulsy outdated. And due to the ICU version being outdated, the timezone-data is also outdated. Not by a month or one or two versions. We are talking years. The probably still widely used Ubuntu LTS version 24.04 – codename Noble Numbat – ships with ICU version 74.2 – released in December 2023. And that ships with the timezone database 2023c from March 2023.

When I realized that, I started digging into how to update the ICU version so that PHP applications can actually get the latest ICU as well as the latest timezone-data.

And then I had to dig into that deeper. And I figured out that it is much easier to do the updates for the ICU timezone-data (not the update of the ICU package itself though! Just the timezone-data!) by installing a package called tzdata-icu!

Install that on your ubuntu machine and you are up-to-date! (Sidenote: Why that package is not automatically installed when installing the ICU package is totally beyond me! Why would one want to use the ICU package that is aweseome for date-formatting but use the outdated timezone information for that?)

Or so I thought…

It turned out that the release of the timezone-database does not mean that there will be a corresponding release of the tzdata-package (or the tzdata-icu package) in Ubuntu. That can take a while. And when it is available it is first available in the proposed channel and then some days later moves to the update channel…

It looked like the tzdata package of Ubuntu for the tzdb release 2026b was released in the update channel in July. Remember: The release of the tzdb was in March.

So. Looks like everything is solved.

Finally I had everything up-to-date. Slightly delayed due to the package-delay, but still!

Along came GithubActions.

Where I installed php running on an Ubuntu system.

And suddenly all my tests that require the latest timezone data failed. Looks like the Ubuntu runner used outdated data

So then… Luckily Derick Rethans maintains the timezonedb package on pecl and that is usually available for PHP with a very short delay! So I installed setup-php with extension: timezonedb and everything was good. (I actually had to use timezonedb-2026.5 but that was due to a bug that should be fixed with the next release!)

What did I learn from this:

  • Just because ther eis a new release of the IANA timezone database doesn’T mean that there is immediately a new release for my distribution
  • The ICU extension uses its own timezone database. And by default a really old one
  • The timezonedb extension for PHP is usually really up-to-date and a safe way to update the timezones for PHP.
  • Updating the timezones for ICU can be really easy depending on the distro
  • The challenge is not creating code that works correctly with timezones. It’s getting the correct data on time.

Bringing “The PHP Community” together

Allgemein

Yesterday the PHPVerse online-conference was taking place. For reasons unrelated to what I am writing about here I didn’t participate. And let me be 100% clear: This is a personal opinion that is based on observations around the conference, not on the content itself!

What is PHPVerse?

PHPVerse is an online conference organized by Jetbrains and free to attend for everyone registered.

The idea is to connect different parts of the splitted PHP-Community which I endorse! So for this edition there were people from the Symfony-, WordPress-, Laravel- and the Drupal-Community doing sessions along with people vocal on the internals mailinglist, maintaining the PHP package manager and from the PHP Foundation.

But this is not about the content that these people brought. What hit me were three fundamental things about “The Community” that in my opinion need to be addressed differently and why I am increasingly weary of such events.

1. The Community

What community are we talking about here. Or let me ask this question slightly different: Which parts of “The Community” are we **not** reaching?

I realised that when I wanted to toot about the event: It doesn’t have an account on mastodon…

🤯

Yes! I know! There are several other social networks out there.

And on the main website of the event there are several social networks showing up right at the top: X, Facebook, LinkedIn and BlueSky.

Given that there is such a thing as a PHP-Community Mastodon server (at https://phpc.social) where an integral part of the PHP-Community is “hanging out” it seems like an odd choice to not at least include that in that list.

I understand that a “Free” event still needs to pay off for someone and that it is far easier to track “interactions” on walled-garden “social” networks. But if you want to do something **for** the community without a vital part **off** the community, that seems like “Doing it wrong™”

2. The time

Interesting was also the timing. When doing an online event, it is really hard to please everyone. Especially when you want to do an event in “only” 8 hours. Due to the nature of the world the PHP-Community is online almost 24h a day. It is spanning from New-Zealand, Australia and Japan on the east side all the way over to the Americas with Alaska and Hawaii reaching out furthest west. (Yes! There are some people even nearer to the date-line, I know!).

The event was set to happen from 11:00 UTC to 16:30 UTC. Which means 23:00 through 4:30 in Auckland. That requires some commitment to follow this event from there. Even as far west as the Indian Subcontinent – where the event took place from 16:30 through 22:00 that requires some commitment to follow that late into the evening.

When I realized that I immediately had to think about this tweet from 2021:

Only that this time event Japan, Australia and New Zealand are missing.

Again: “The Community” is actually only a part of the community that we are talking about.

3. The people

And then I stumbled upon a toot from Pauline Vos:

Just saw the trailer for the PHP documentary shown at PHPVerse…

ZERO women? Are you serious? 5 women (including at least 3 past or present core developers that I know of, and the executive director) on the @thephpf , and the story of PHP includes ZERO women?

Not to mention those prominent in the community that aren’t part of the Foundation itself. You can’t be serious.

Yes! There are not that many women around in the PHP Community. One might think. But actually there are. But with this kind of marketing, that amount will – to put it mildly – not increase.

Again: A huge part of the community not only lost but actually alienated.

Takeaway

To summarize: Time, Interaction and trailer-Content indicate that “The Community” the PHPVerse is talking about, is the European and North-American male dominated part that is still hanging out on the BigCorporation networks.

That is not the PHP Community I know and that I consider myself a part of. On the contrary! That seems to be the image that the PHP Community needs to get away of to actually become a world-wide, welcoming, vibrant, and healthy community.

Oh! And before you start responding with reasons why something doesn’t work or can’t be done differently: Think about this:

Where there’s a will, there’s a way; where there isn’t, there’s an excuse.

Property-Hooks for the win

Allgemein, Development, PHP, , ,

Property-Hooks were one of the really hot topics of last years PHP8.4 release. And I do have very strong opinions on them. They were and probably still are extremely hyped for something that in my personal opinion should be a very niche thing. In new projects you shouldn’t really need them.

But just today I had one of those situations where they helped me combine legacy code with new functionality.

The starting position

I am working on a project where we are using PDO and especially PDO::FETCH_CLASS to create Objects from our database-content.

So the code looks something like this:

function getAllFoos() : array
{
    $stmt = $this->executePdoQuery(<<<SQL
        SELECT * FROM table
        SQL);
    $stmt->setFetchMode(PDO::FETCH_CLASS, Foo::class);

    return $stmt->fetchAll();
}

Foo looks something like this:

final class Foo 
{
    public string a;
    public string b;
}

And the database-table looks something like this:

CREATE TABLE foo (
    a VARCHAR(20),
    b VARCHAR(20),
)

Everything worked as expected and calling getAllFoos got me a list of Foo-objects.

So Far so good.

Now I wanted to add a new field to the Foo-object and that should contain an Enum. Easy peasy.

final class Foo 
{
    public string a;
    public string b;
    private Status $status;
}

enum Status: string {
    case Open = 'open';
    case Closed = 'closed';
}

Now I need to update the database

ALTER TABLE foo ADD COLUMN `status` VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'open';

That’s it!

When testing that though I found that it wasn’t because now everything blew up when calling getAllFoos ….

What happened?

Well, as expected the fetchAll tried to hydrate the values of the Foo object wth the values from the DB. But the DB contains a string whereas the Foo object expects the respective enum.

There is no out of the box solution to this. PDO has no idea how to convert this database-value into something the object understands (it could infer the expected enum-type from the type-hint but that can get out of hand rather quickly when it’s not an enum bot any other object that doesn’t have a ::from method or…)

Property Hooks to the rescue.

So I had to find my own way around this. And here property hooks are awesome when one has to adapt to legacy code.

So this is what my Foo class now looks like

final class Foo 
{
    public string a;
    public string b;
    private Status $status {
        set(string|Status $value) {
            if (is_string($value)) {
                $value = Status::from($value);
            }
            
            $this->status = $value;
        }
    }
}

Works like a charm now!

Content-Negotiation

Allgemein, Development

A few years back I had a great live-experience regarding failed Content-Negotiation. I was sitting in Montreal in a restaurant waiting for the waiter. Once they came they asked me something in french and I immediately told them that I don’t understand french and whether we could speak english. We could. So I got a menu (in english and french) and a few minutes later they came back to take my order. And they talked to me – again – in french. So we had to go through the whole dance again.

What does that have to do with Content-Negotiation? Well: We did negotiate that we would communicate in english. Comming back to me with some language that we already had established I can’t understand doesn’t make sense. And I might just not understand what they want.

Continue reading Content-Negotiation →

Happy Birthday PHP

Allgemein, PHP

Today is a very personal day that is deeply connected with the programming language thatI use most – I could even say “love”.

On this day 30 years ago a certain Rasmus Lerdorf made his Personal HomePage tools publicly available. The birth of a language that should change the WorldWideWeb – conincidentally invented by a person that celebrates their birthday on exactly this day!

In these last 30 days PHP has become the programming language powering the majority of public websites – ask 3 different surveys and you’ll probably get 4 different percentage values. But all of them state that PHP is the by far most used language.

PHP has reduced the entry barrier for (web) development significantly which is probably one of the most underrated things that PHP did for programming in those last 30 years.

And due to that a lot of people started programming and were able to throw together something that worked. A lot of those people in the early days had probably not a background in programming. They did a lot of things… differently. Probably even wrong. Which also led to a lot of security issues. Which is why to this day PHP has a bad reputation of being slow and insecure and is by a lot of people not considered a “real” programming language.

And so for 30 years now people are regularly referring to PHP as a “dead language”. But well… a creaking door hangs longest…

One of the things that also developed in these 30 years is a vivid community around the language.

I first came into contact with it in form of a mailing list in 2001. And little did I know where that would lead me.

It allowed me to learn programming – first by asking questions – soon realizing that I was even able to answer some of the questions. Which allowed me to dive deeper into programming in my first real job. Which brought me into contact with more and more people from the local community. It even introduced me to my local usergroup around 2011.

And from that point on there was no turning back. I was thrown into co-organizing our local usergroup. And I realized that it would be really awesome to be able to visit other usergroups. But there wasn’t a list of other usergroups. So … I had to scratch my itch and build a list, hadn’t I?

And gosh that exploded…

It brought me into contact with so many more amazing people and opened doors that I am absolutely grateful for! It even caused me to submit a talk to a conference because a fried I made via the usergroup-organizer chat thought I should. So in 2015 I got accepted and spoke for the very first time at a PHP conference. And suddenly I stood there beneath all those big names in the PHP-community – and it turned out they were mere mortals and we had a great time!

But – and here the sad part starts – 2015 was the year that my better half got diagnosed with cancer. And due to her chemotherapy (and a change in it that required a weekly dosage) she wasn’t able to join me in this experience.

She went through it and everything was fine again.

Until on this day 5 years ago. On the 8th of June. We got the diagnose that the bastard was back again!

And when I publicly wrote about it, the PHP community did again the for me unexpected. The wave of support that hit me was overwhelming. I still sometimes have trouble understanding it! But you are all amazing!

So celebrating 30 years of PHP for me is so much more than celebrating the birth of a programming language.

It is celebrating the birth of a community that carried the Personal Homepage Tools of some quirky greenland-born guy to one of the cornerstones of the WorldWideWeb and beyond.

It is celebrating a Community that has supported me in so many ways that I can’t describe.

It is celebrating a community that connects people from all over the world in a family-kind of way (Yes that also includes the odd uncle that will always pop up somewhere).

And personally I celebrate a community that has carried and supported me through 10 years of every now and then tough times. And that has brought me a lot of friendships that I do not want to miss!

Thank you Rasmus for sparking this!