Phil Sturgeon

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Phil Sturgeon

Phil Sturgeon

Software Engineer gone ferril. Digital nomad since 2018 (bike/van). Now dedicated to woodland creation and restoration, as co-founder of UK climate chairty Protect Earth.

The State of Markdown

The answer to "What is the State of Markdown?" is "Yes, it's a f**king state." Markdown has been around for a long time, since John Gruber released it in 2004. Since then everyone and their dog has come up with extensions, some of

Alien Status: Extraordinary Again

A few months ago I wrote a bit of an emotional article about my visa status, and how I was in a bit of a pickle. A few people since have wanted an update, so here it is. I had lost my job when the startup I worked for imploded

Should you commit your Composer lock file?

Should you commit your Composer lock file?

Davey Shafik wrote a great article for EngineYard called Composer: It’s All About the Lock File. The point of his article is to try and suggest people get a lot more used to committing their composer.lock files. Please, do go read his article now and for the love

PHP Wars: Attack of the Clones

In the last article I said I wanted to write about when its a good idea to release a component. A lot of this comes down to: is there one out there that does what I want, and if so, can I use it? This blog post is going to

What is The League of Extraordinary Packages?

This is the story of group of friends, who decided to write some code, but somehow confused and angered everyone with a keyboard. tl:dr; "Waaaaah why doesn't everyone like usssss..." That said, the long-form might entertain anyone who is curious about The League. It has

Anger and Guilt in Open-Source

In the tech industry far too many people pretend that everything is O.K. We pretend that sexism isn't rife. We pretend that startup failures are a "success" in some way. We ignore negative feedback and only publish success. We pretend that our work is amazing

I was an Extraordinary Alien... For a Week

The last seven months have been a weird time. I started off the year with the knowledge that the startup I worked for was running out of money. This was not huge in itself as most startups are defined by their time to live, or their "runway." It