Programming

Is there something simiar to Affenformular in englisch?

You're doing fine. I built a couple social media type sites in raw PHP over 15 years ago. They never went anywhere but they did help get my foot in the door at a couple dev shops back in the day.

Years later I rewrote them in codeigniter. So that's about all the advice I can give because I'm certain that my sites had security holes in them too.

Reading your experience took me down memory lane. Thanks for the throwback.

Ahhh, self doubt, my old friend...

"There is probably a better way" is a fairly common feeling. In fact there probably is a better way. But at some point you need to be pragmatic and be happy with "good enough". Don't let perfect be the enemy of good (enough) as they say...

That said - follow your intuitions as well that things could be done better. Don't be afraid to just re-write a bunch of things to see if an idea works better. Like grouping things from some "common.php" into domain specific functionality (dates.php, db.php, etc.). Or re-working how your front-end works. Maybe read other code or ask for code review from people more experienced, or even from an AI (yes, yes, I know, but they can be useful).

One problem you can find yourself in is that you've created code that's very difficult to understand, but since you're "in it" right now you understand it completely. If you put the code down for a week or two and come back to it you may find it very difficult to re-learn. If using classes, creating a DAO layer, or some other pattern helps to make your code easier to read then it's worth following.

As awful as this project might be against “the real world” use, I feel weirdly proud of what I’m achieving. Is there a name for this feeling, of pride for something you know is subpar?

that's called being human my dude. people love building things, no matter how shit they are. The first step to accomplishing something big is accomplishing something small (or shit!). A great example of this is the Queen of Shitty Robots

Be really careful with this.

You might accidentally develop your own framework that you end up working on for 17 years, pulling out the best part, and rewriting it in Node.js.

Jk jk. Congrats, and I hope you love it. :) PHP is a really good language.

That's the beauty (and horror) of PHP!

Fun for small stuff, good for learning. Unpretentious. Dead simple to deploy.

I think that feeling (at least in coding) is the satisfaction of learning. I’m definitely a learn by mistakes kind of learner and the fact that you’re chugging along, getting familiar with the language and its quirks, and has a sense that there’s a better way right around the corner, it seems like the right path to me. I feel like all of it becomes a bit less enjoyable when you eventually learn the “proper” way and don’t allow yourself to do things any other way.

You'd have a problem if you felt like you made something perfect. You can improve those "wrongs" in any order but getting something up and working first and foremost is a very sane way to get some practice in.

On the one hand, you do have good reasons to use classes.

1. Interacting with your database.
2. Sanitizing your inputs.
3. Building pages from templates.

Rather than piecemeal loading all these functions from every page where a bunch of them aren't being used, you can create three classes.

1. has all your database interactions in it and then you can treat all database interactions as an object. My queries are usually all executed with $Data->runQuery();

2. Since you're working in raw PHP with no frameworks or libraries, you NEED to validate every input users send, or bots are going to spam the shit out of your database. The way you have things now, you're probably either calling some function(s) on every form submit (every time $_SERVER['request_method']==='POST') OR you're just not doing it. When working in raw PHP, I always write a Validator class which sits in between every $_GET and $_POST and makes damn sure what ever is coming in meets a set of criteria that I expect. I'm happy to go into the architecture of this with you if that would be helpful.

3. I'm assuming you might have something for each page like

include('header.php');

include('footer.php');

Instead, I like to write a page builder class that constructs my pages dynamically based on routing. So then any given page becomes and instance of $Page and you populate it with various methods (like $Page->renderForm('form');) You can also then base the routing logic on your form submissions.

On the other hand... it's probably fine at this stage to just not use classes and if it works, why fix it?

You probably feel like you don't have a need for classes because you're just not comfortable working with them yet, and need more experience thinking through architecture. This is fine. This is normal. This is exactly where you should be, given what you say about your experience level.

SQL injection probably didn't work because PDO protects you from that to some extent. Doesn't mean you shouldn't account for it in your input processing.

Most of my HTML comes from echo.

Good, it should. I effing HATE reading through code where people are tagging in and out of PHP all the time. It looks so ugly. That's not a standard best practice, just MY personal practice. IMHO, for HUMAN readability purposes, HTML should either be in echos or template files.

I fricken hate this: <a> <bunch> <of> <html> <php? run_some_php('here'); />

Don't effing make me read that. I co-run an independent coding shop and whenever we work in PHP, I tell people please not to do that.

It has been a very long time since I've worked with PHP, so I can't help you with specific runtime stuff, like what the cost of module imports is.

But not using classes is a perfectly valid approach. The only issue is ofc that you need to hardcode column names, but it sounds like that's at a manageable place for you right now.

Organizing things into classes makes things easier once the operations you're doing on data get more complex. There are no good rules for this, you kinda have to develop a feel for it on your own as you gain experience.

For the specific case of SQL results, you'll typically be better off using what's known as an ORM library. Here's a random one I found on GH as an example. But for your small project, what you're doing right now is fine.

As awful as this project might be against “the real world” use

All those patterns and frameworks and things people use are meant to make a codebase more manageable or flexible. ORMs are a good example: they have a lot of benefits, but they are by no means required.

With that said, your zero guardrails approach is likely to end up an unmaintainable spaghetti mess as you add more and more features. There is a point at which you really should sit down and learn about those more advanced techniques and practices. They actually do have value, especially if you ever want to build something bigger than what you have now.

I feel weirdly proud of what I’m achieving. Is there a name for this feeling, of pride for something you know is subpar?

You should feel proud. You accomplished something 99% of the population hasn't. You leveled up. You're a real motherfucking software engineer. You've used your brain in ways those AI slop coders never will. There is no "subpar". When you break your 1RM record at the gym, is it "subpar" just because the guy next to you can do twice the weight?

Fuck no, because you're fighting your fights, he's fighting his. All that matters is that you're winning.

And you are winning.

You're a winner.

You're my winner.

I love you.

This sounds really close to what i had to do in school for php. I had to make everything without objects at first. Then the teacher said half eay through to make everything into objects.