You've stumbled across the archive of the blog posts I wrote back in 2014 and prior. Feel free to peruse, through everything from code snippets that never made it to GitHub, to random ramblings about my passion for technology.
var_dump in PHP, by default, prints the results of var_dump to the output in the same way that print would. This prevents us from doing things like echo "Variable 'x' is: " . var_dump($x) . ".";.
To prevent this, we can use the output buffer instead.