otsch (Christian Olear)

Made it to 10,000 installs of the crwlr/crawler package! 🥳💪🏻
Here’s to the next 10,000! 🥂

I think that rule is not only valid for juniors, but for devs in general: don't use code you haven't read and fully understood.

PIE, the new PHP Extension Installer is 1.0.0! 🥳💪🏻

Christian Olear (Otsch) – Freelance Web Developer – Linz (AT) Christian Olear (Otsch) is a freelance web developer based in Linz (AT). Focus areas: (SaaS) web apps, PHP legacy projects, and web crawling & scraping.

🧑‍💻 I’m open for freelance projects!

Complex custom Web apps, APIs, Web crawling/scraping - PHP-focused 🐘, with many years of experience 👴🏻

More + CV: www.otsch.codes

Feel free to share!

Because they had large Perl legacy applications or...?

Valid points 👍🏻 Still, imo the main argument is: you need to understand the code being generated - especially if real users rely on your app. Even manually well tested apps can break unexpectedly. If you’re not a dev, you’ll have to hope AI can fix it.
Great for mockups and throwaway apps, though!

German Wolf Association...interesting! 🐺
I tried Perl at first too, but had no guidance and couldn’t even get a simple ‘Hello World’ running at that age. I quickly stumbled upon PHP, which made getting started so much easier! 🤩🐘

PHP turns 30 today! 🐘🥳
My story with PHP started about 25 years ago, when I was 13, coding a guestbook 😅
When did you join the party?

European Citizens' Initiative Give your support !

Friends who are EU citizens, please consider signing this initiative against conversion "therapies":

eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/

About 400,000 signatures are still needed in just a couple of days. I think it's possible! Sign!

🥳 Looking at the votes, it seems like we’ll have a Pipe operator in PHP 8.5

wiki.php.net/rfc/pipe-ope...

#php

parse_str - replacing dot and space with underscore in keys · Issue #8639 · php/php-src Description I just remembered this behavior when using parse_str(), that dots and spaces in query string keys are replaced with underscore, for the reason that those aren't allowed in PHP variable ...

I created this issue a few years ago github.com/php/php-src/...

Also have a package github.com/crwlrsoft/qu... (also used in github.com/crwlrsoft/url) which solves the issue and therefore also became a dependency of bref (github.com/brefphp/bref...).

Just found that I still have this bag 😅
Anyone else been there?

A mirror selfie of myself in sportswear and a Shirt saying "Run PHP" on it. It looks like the logo of the Hip Hop group Run DMC.

When I go for a run! 🏃🏼‍♂️🐘😅

Reached some install milestones for the crwlr packages 🎉
- url passed 50,000 installs
- query-string is at an unbelievable 3,000,000 installs (thanks to bref!)
- robots-txt is approaching 15,000
- crawler will soon reach 10,000

Thanks to everyone using and supporting the packages! 🫶

First talk „So, you think you know PHPUnit“ by Sebastian Bergmann 🤓

Oh sorry, it's "ViennaPHP ❤️ Laravel Vienna"!

ViennaPHP ❤️ Laravel Vienna x Sebastian Bergmann, Tue, May 6, 2025, 6:30 PM | Meetup Fellow PHP artisans! YES, you've read the title right: Sebastian Bergmann is nice enough to stop by on his way to ComoCamp. Let's come together for talks, pizza and drinks,

Looking forward to see Sebastian Bergmann and other great speakers and people at the Laravel Vienna Meetup later today! 🙂🤓🥳
www.meetup.com/laravel-fram...

Imho, registrars should make it way easier to have nameservers/DNS set up correctly before the transfer. Or actually make it hard to mess it up! Suggest importing the current DNS records or nameserver - shouldn't be that hard, right?
5/5

Whois now shows the NS change, but I'm still waiting for the browser to realize it 🙈
Has anyone ever transferred a domain to a different registrar without downtime? Is that even possible? 😅
4/5

Opening Dev Tools, I saw the HTTP request for saving the NS change actually returned a 500 error. But nothing was shown in the UI! 🙈 Holy crap… After that, I waited for their support for 20 minutes, and then it took another 30 minutes to finally resolve the problem.
3/5

…and it looked like it worked. I hit "save" and there was no error shown. But as my site was still down after a while, I got a bit skeptical. So I went back to the registrar's admin tool and noticed the nameserver change hadn't worked at all.
2/5

I just transferred a domain to a different registrar. My DNS records were already managed at a different provider, so I just wanted to point the domain to those nameservers again. I was prepared for a little downtime and immediately tried to change the nameservers after the transfer was done…
1/5

YouTube video by CodeSource The Untold Story of Git

Just recently watched this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq41...
Crazy that Linus built it in 10 days 😅

Like for example, when you end up in a dead end and the AI suggests something like, ‘Maybe you have wings, then you could just fly on? Or maybe you have a shovel to dig your way through?’ No! In this case, just tell me to turn around please! 😅🙈
2/2

I think another aspect of this that annoyed me recently is how ChatGPT sometimes wastes my time by stubbornly trying to come up with a solution where there is none. Or none that makes sense for a rational human.
1/2

Oh no :/

Laravel 12 is Now Released - Laravel News Laravel 12 has been released. It introduces new starter kits for React, Vue, and Livewire and updates the latest upstream dependencies.

Laravel 12 is Now Released

And that was even before AI! Using AI to write code that people don’t fully understand won’t just lead to messy codebases - it will likely slow down how quickly juniors learn, too.
2/2

Yep! A few years ago, I read that the number of programmers worldwide - due to high demand - was growing rapidly. So, a large percentage of devs are fairly new, often just starting with a bootcamp. Made me think we’re probably going to see a lot of sh***y, buggy apps being built these years 😅🙈
1/2

this haptic display absolutely rocks. basketball is for everyone.