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Scott Keck-Warren is a Senior Software Engineer at Activated Insights and is also a published author, podcast host, conference speaker, consultant, and producer of education content for web application developers. He's been a professional PHP developer, DevOps engineer, and team lead for over a decade delivering solutions for his clients that produce real-world results.
Recent Posts
December 11, 2025
I'm Speaking at PHPTek 2026!
I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be speaking at PHPTek 2026 in Chicago! This will be my fourth year speaking at the conference, and I couldn't be more excited. If you've never been to PHPTek, you're missing out on some amazing opportunities to learn...
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December 4, 2025
Every Day in 2026 in Y-m-d Format
Every year, I had a need to have a list of every date in the next year for content planning purposes. I could have done it in Excel but I figured I might as well spend 10 times the amount of time writing it in PHP. The list is as follows for anyone...
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October 24, 2025
SQL Database Design For Developers - Longhorn PHP 2025
My slides and links from my SQL Database Design For Developers talk at Longhorn PHP 2025
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July 7, 2025
Why Your Team Needs a Custom Coding Standard
One of the biggest challenges of working on a development team is that everyone writes code a little (or a lot) differently. One of my favorite examples of this is how many ways you can format an if statement. Take the following:
Some...
June 30, 2025
Using the Right Types in PHP Means Shipping Fewer Bugs
One of the biggest reasons programming projects turn into a mess isn’t the language itself. It’s the way individual programmers use the language. PHP is what is known as a "loosely typed" language, which means you can pass a string to a function...
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June 9, 2025
Why You *Really* Need a Pre-Commit Script for Your PHP Projects
Git Hooks can super charge your development flow
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June 7, 2025
Bulk Creating Thumbnails at the Command Line
I've been working on wrap-up articles for my days at phptek 2025 and as part of those posts I've been including some of the pictures I took. As a "lazy programmer," I'm always looking to automate even the smallest thing like creating 25 thumbnails so...
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June 2, 2025
What is the `make` Command in Linux?
If you've ever worked on a project that uses a compiled language like C or C++, you've probably bumped into the make command. It's been built to be used for projects that have a complex build, test, and install process. However, even in...
May 26, 2025
Why Consistency Is Everything in Software Engineering
If there’s one soft skill that quietly saves you from a mountain of bugs, confusion, and late-night debugging sessions, it’s consistency.
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May 22, 2025
Reducing Bugs With Static Code Analysis - php tek 2025
My slides and links from my Reducing Bugs With Static Code Analysis talk at php tek 2025
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May 20, 2025
SQL Database Design For Developers - php tek 2025
My slides and links from my SQL Database Design For Developers talk at php[tek] 2025
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May 16, 2025
What Is the Purpose of Git Hooks? A Beginner-Friendly Guide
Git Hooks can super charge your development flow
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February 24, 2025
PhpStorm: Refactoring With Extract Variable
PHPStorm has some amazing refactoring support build into it. One of the refactoring tools I reach for on a common basis is the the extract variable refactoring which allows us to take a statement and turn it into a variable. For example, we may have...
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February 17, 2025
PhpStorm: Refactoring With Inline Variable
One of the code smells that drive me up the wall is when there's a variable that exists just to pass around a value. For example in the code below we're setting $value to 42 and then returning $value. The...
February 10, 2025
PhpStorm: Paste History
PHPStorm, like most text editors, has the ability to copy and paste text using Command-C to copy and Command-V to paste. Normally this gets saved to the computer's clipboard and we can only have a single piece of data on the clipboard at a time. The...
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February 3, 2025
PhpStorm: InlineError Plugin
I love PhpStorm, but one of the things that really drives me nuts is the fact that I can type errors and it'll just put this little squiggly guy underneth the error but I don't know what that actually means without hovering my mouse over this I'm not...
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January 21, 2025
Speaking at php[tek] 2025
I'm excited to annouce I will speaking at php[tek] this year on database design and static code analysis. There are still tickets available and there are some really great speakers that will be in attendence. https://phptek.io/
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