The Art of Data

This month, we dive into Libsodium, discuss gatekeeping, learn more about data access, and why even something that might be considered a “small bug” can cause massive damage.

I’m not sure how many people read these Editorials. It’s even been explained to me that this isn’t an “Editorial.” Ha, the joke’s on them; I’m not an editor, sooooo yeah. I always enjoyed reading what Oscar had to say about the articles in the month’s issues and seeing what little nuggets of knowledge he shared.

I am not sure if I have any actual words of wisdom to share, but that’s never stopped me from talking before, so I don’t see why that would change now. We’ve been talking a lot about change lately, but the reality is, “change” is what our industry is about. Sure there are personal changes. People change jobs, leave projects, organizers of User Groups move away, but our industry also changes. What we consider “good security practices” today can be viewed as a horrible implementation tomorrow. Anyone who has worked on a legacy codebase for enough time knows the feeling of looking at code and thinking, “why was it done like this? This is terrible”, then checking the commit logs and realizing they did the coding and remember, “Oh right, that is how we did this five years ago.”

In this issue, Vinícius Campitelli returns to follow up his article from last month with more cryptography talk. This month he talks specifically about *Cryptography with Libsodium*, what it is, why you should be using it, and how you should be using it. In *Exploring the Active Record Pattern,* Alexandros Gougousis discusses the popular Active Record Pattern and some of the benefits of using this pattern to handle persisting data to the backend database.

In Security Corner this month, Eric Mann takes us on a personal journey with a bug report for a package he was maintaining in his article *No Bug Too Small,* and as you can probably guess from the title, the “small bug” was a big problem. Moving on to Joe Ferguson’s *The Workshop* article *Intro to Craft CMS*, Joe talks about one of the PHP powerhouses in the CMS market, CraftCMS. Built on the Yii framework, Joe takes you from install to asset management and gets your CMS up and running in a matter of a couple of pages. *Education Station’s* Chris Tankersley returns us to our data access discussion with *Handling Data Access* and jumps into different ways to handle data access, including raw access to abstraction layers and back to data access layers. This month, Oscar Merida continues to toy with our minds and emotions in his PHP Puzzles column about *Compounding Interest.* He then challenges us with another economic puzzle to finish out the year. Also, this month, I had the pleasure to speak with Wasseem Khayratte, aka 7PHP, in this month’s *Community Corner*. I learned more about what got him involved with the PHP community and his new role as the voice behind Voices of the elePHPant. In this month’s *Here Be Dragons: Problem Space*, Edward touches on a couple of topics most of us had been through at some point in our careers, Burn Out and Gatekeeping. And in finally{} Beth Tucker Long discusses her *Roll With It* philosophy and the idea of embracing change. Thanks for being a reader and I hope you enjoy this issue.

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