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PHP Podcast – August 6, 2026Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling
A sick kitten steals the show, Sara loses a fight with her smart lights, PHP 8.6 beta is almost here, and the crew argues about roadmaps, deprecations, and why you shouldn’t be a meat proxy. Cats, Ice Cream, and Bobbleheads
The episode opened with the usual chaos: Holly’s kitten Rosie made a full appearance, having spent the week battling a chest infection that turned into a sinus and ear infection and threw off her balance. Three vet visits later, Rosie was recovering but very cuddly — and apparently convinced Holly’s headset mic was a cat toy. Sara, catless but armed with ice cream, argued that ice cream beats cats because there’s no poop to clean up.
The conversation spun into merchandise ideas after Eric dropped a photo of a bobblehead in the Discord. The crew riffed on 3D-printing speaker action figures and bobbleheads for the conference, with Holly getting Eric on record that it “would not be expensive” — a statement immediately screenshotted for posterity. Sara and Holly quickly reminded everyone that multicolor prints are their own painful challenge, and someone with Warhammer 40k painting patience would be required.
PHP 8.6 Beta on the Horizon
With 8.6 beta 1 landing a week out, the hosts walked through the highlights from the Stitcher.io “what’s new” write-up. Sara was excited about partial function application finally arriving, though Holly isn’t thrilled with the … syntax — but couldn’t propose a better one either. They dug into an earlier, unshipped design that used $1/$2 positional placeholders (similar to Swift), and Joe kept circling back to Python-style named arguments before admitting he wasn’t entirely sure he was describing the right feature.
They also covered read-only property defaults (a natural follow-on to 8.4’s property hooks on interfaces), the new polling API that’s largely future-facing for threading and concurrency work, the new clamp() function, and a long-overdue Duration class. Holly repeatedly questioned why something like clamp() needs to be in the language at all, with Sara conceding the point but noting PHP is a “kitchen sink language” and that ship has sailed. For Duration, Sara made the case that it genuinely belongs in core because it’s tied to the timezone knowledge baked into the underlying date/time library.
Deprecations and the Two Populations of PHP
Joe pulled up numbers comparing deprecation RFCs across recent versions — roughly 28 proposals for 8.6, 46 for 8.5, 26 for 8.4, just six for 8.3, and none actually voted on for 8.2 (which Sara guessed lined up with Nikita stepping back to work on LLVM, back when deprecations were called “Nikita’s hit list”). Many of the 8.6 deprecations, organized by Gina P. Banyard, aim to free up words to become reserved keywords in future versions.
The list() deprecation came up as a sore spot: Holly would love to see it gone and never uses it in new code, while Joe worries the blast radius across legacy codebases is enormous. That led Sara to articulate the core tension: there are two very different populations of PHP users — the ones aggressively upgrading and adopting new features (the podcast’s audience), and the ones who just want to run their WordPress site without the language shifting under them. Both groups matter, and the language has to push forward without needlessly breaking the second group.
The Roadmap Debate
Building on deprecations, the crew wished aloud that PHP had something resembling a roadmap — not set-in-stone dates, but broad aims like “a feature like X might justify bumping to 9.” Joe suggested borrowing from game dev studios, who publish colorful roadmaps with rough years instead of hard dates and don’t crucify anyone when things slip. Holly noted that even the AI she was workshopping a blog post with warned that PHP internals doesn’t handle the word “roadmap” well and to assume any such proposal will fail.
Sara, invoking her “lawyer’s advice” not to mention it was a recent meeting topic, pointed out the practical wrinkle: the foundation’s paid developers are largely self-directed, and no one is telling them what donors want them to build. Still, everyone agreed a shared set of goals would be valuable. Holly and Sara also gave a shout-out to the unsung, unsexy work — documentation, triage, bug fixing — that keeps the lights on, and to the foundation’s first quarterly progress report for showing what contractors are actually doing.
Longhorn PHP and Travel Logistics
Holly announced her Longhorn PHP talk, “That’s Your Website, Not Your Mobile App,” slotted at 2:30 in Austin on October 15–16. The talk is a venting session about her pet peeve: teams wrapping a Laravel/React/whatever website in a native shell and shipping it as an app without bridging the model differences — regardless of tech stack. She noted it’s her first time at Longhorn, though she recently spoke at a Chicago mobile developers meetup exactly one week shy of ten years after her last appearance there.
The travel talk sprawled into a would-be road-trip convoy (picking up Joe in Memphis, A. Woods from New York, and even attempting to ferry Sara’s car across the ocean), plus a tangent on how absurdly expensive Amtrak is compared to flying — versus Sara’s 20-euro monthly rail pass in Portugal that covers the entire length of the country.
Don’t Be a Meat Proxy
The show closed on Niklas Gruhn’s blog post “Don’t Be a Meat Proxy,” which argues against copy-pasting raw AI output at other humans. Joe described his own workflow: read the AI feedback, condense and distill it, rewrite it, and clearly label anything unvetted (robot emoji included) so teammates know he hasn’t verified it yet. Sara pushed the point harder — if you’re just regurgitating what Claude or Gemini said, the person asking could have done that themselves, so you’re not adding value.
Holly complicated it with real-world nuance: some coworkers ask questions they could’ve answered themselves, then call you rude when you give a condensed answer and keep poking at its edges. The crew acknowledged a whole gradient exists — from “let me Google that for you” territory to genuine “what’s the best way to approach X” conversations that aren’t fact lookups. Sara, self-professed AI hater, admitted the balance has shifted toward “just search it” because AIs are genuinely good at search — with plenty of deep irony noted about machines being good at reading and grokking information humans don’t want to. Bonus: Holly praised naming xAI’s bot “Grok” as genuinely clever.
Links from the show:* PHP Tek 2027 — Early bird tickets and hotel block available * PHP Tek CFP — Open until the end of the month * Longhorn PHP — October 15–16, Austin * What’s new in PHP 8.6 (Stitcher.io) * PHP Foundation’s quarterly report for Q2 2026 * Eric’s Laracon 2026 wrap up * PHP Podcast Subscribe Page
Hosts:Joe Ferguson* Mastodon: @joepferguson@phpc.social * PHPArch.me: @svpernova09
Sara Golemon* Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social
Holly Schilling* Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt
Streams:* + Youtube Channel + Twitch
Connect & HirePHP Architect Website
Twitter/X
Mastodon
Hire PHP DevelopersLooking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
Displace
Infrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
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OurCVEs
Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs
CodeRabbit
Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.
PHP Architect Consulting
Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor
PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on
https://www.phparch.com/consulting/
Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
Join Us Live Next WeekYoutube Channel
Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com
The post The PHP Podcast 2026.08.06 appeared first on PHP Architect.
In this episode, Scott talks with Andrey Kucherenko, creator of jscpd, about why copy-pasted code is an anti-pattern, how jscpd detects duplicate code across dozens of languages, and how the tool has evolved to work inside agentic coding workflows.
Links:* Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx * Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt
Andrey’s Links:* jscpd – https://jscpd.dev/
Scott’s Links:* Website – https://scott.keck-warren.com/ * Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/scottkeckwarren.bsky.social * LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-keck-warren-91689810/ * Mastodon – https://phpc.social/@scottkeckwarren
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The post Community Corner: JSCPD with Andrey Kucherenko appeared first on PHP Architect.
PHP Alive and Kicking – August 4, 2026Hosts: Chris Miller (standing in solo while Mike is on holiday)
Mike escaped to a beach so Chris hosts alone with special guest Derick Rethans. Expect date-time philosophy, PHP 8.6 goodies, Xdebug secrets, deprecation drama, and a heated debate about how to queue at a pub. From University Websites to Committing to PHP
Derick traces his PHP origins back to his university days, building websites that needed database connectivity. ASP.NET was an option, but nobody wanted to pay for it — Linux was cool, and PHP was easy to start using. That combination hooked him early.
His very first accepted contribution came from a practical need: everyone wanted centered Shockwave Flash films on their pages, back before CSS even existed. Centering meant knowing the width of a file, and while getimagesize() already existed (and still works today), it didn’t understand Flash. Derick added that support.
From there he fell into bug triage, spending several years working through the issue tracker alongside Jani Taskinen (whose “Sniper” name still shows up in commit logs). For a long time it was just the two of them reproducing and fixing bugs — an important task that gets neglected easily, which is exactly how backlogs of a thousand issues and pull requests build up.
The Eternal Problem of Date and Time
Chris and Derick dig into why date-time bugs are so hard to triage: date algorithms are genuinely complicated, and it takes real time to figure out whether a report is a user’s mistake or an actual PHP bug. Crashes are easy to reproduce; subtle date arithmetic is not.
The core philosophical question is “what does adding a month even mean?” If it’s January 31st and you add a month, PHP historically just bumps the month number, producing February 31st, which overflows to March 2nd or 3rd. But most people who add a month really just want the next month and don’t care about day counts — so “next month” is conceptually distinct from “add a month.” Derick has been brainstorming better interfaces so people can’t make these mistakes, though it’s a lot of work.
They touch on Carbon as a unified interface people understand, but agree that making Carbon the language standard isn’t the right move. At the language level you need something that works for everybody and ideally doesn’t break existing code.
What’s Coming in PHP 8.6
The first new time class is landing: a Duration object representing seconds and nanoseconds within a specific range, living in the Time namespace. It’s a trial run for new APIs and immediately useful — for example, passing a duration to sleep or to timeouts in the new polling API, rather than juggling raw integers.
Another highlight is partial function application. With the pipe operator from 8.5, piping into anything that takes more than one argument meant wrapping it in a closure (and extra parentheses because of how the parser works). Partials let you pre-fill some arguments so the resulting callable accepts just one — perfect for pipelines.
There’s also TLS session resumption support for streams, which lets OpenSSL shortcut the expensive session setup on repeated TLS connections. Bigger stream-layer work by Jakub Zelenka of the PHP Foundation is underway too, but that’s a huge job on old code and won’t make 8.6 — Chris and Derick both note the pain of keeping a year-and-a-half-long project in sync with the master branch.
Xdebug in 8.6 and the Xdebug Cloud
Xdebug’s recent headline feature (shipped with 8.5) is native path mapping, which lets you configure remote-to-local path mappings inside Xdebug itself instead of your IDE — handy when your code runs in Docker or on a dev machine. Feedback since release is driving quality-of-life improvements. For 8.6, relatively little is broken, though a change to how PHP reports line numbers needs untangling so debugging stops on the correct lines.
Derick also has a new code-coverage implementation that gives better, more correct results at roughly a 10% speed cost. He’d rather ship correct output than fast output — and points out that PHPCov may be quicker but skips path and branch coverage entirely. The pair discuss how branch coverage doubles your test count at every branching point, and how Xdebug has a hard limit (around 64K) to avoid running out of memory on pathological code.
Finally, Chris asks about Xdebug Cloud — a paid service that enables debugging where networking otherwise wouldn’t, such as remote teams sharing a single development machine (an SSH tunnel only lets one person listen on the debug port). It’s £15/month or £150/year for an individual, priced similarly to Packagist’s private packages, and helps fund Derick’s ongoing Xdebug work. He plans to do more marketing about it this year.
Deprecations, Consensus, and Two-Thirds Votes
Every year PHP collects a big list of deprecations — around 20 to 25 this cycle — voted on separately. Derick is more reluctant than most to approve them, arguing many offer no clear user benefit. His examples: deprecating metaphone() (whose suggested Composer replacement ironically relies on the internal function) and the dechunk filter (which can’t really be removed because HTTP streams use it internally).
The list() deprecation is another sore point — Chris uses it, and the vote is tied 21–21 with one abstention, so it won’t pass under the two-thirds rule. Derick reminds everyone that “yes” needs to be twice “no.” Returning from a finally block is another candidate that makes little sense to use but hurts nothing to keep.
Chris and Derick reflect on how voting was originally meant to confirm consensus reached on the mailing list, not to be the decision itself. A 50%+1 result isn’t consensus; two-thirds is the compromise, even if true 75–80% agreement would be ideal. Joe notes many deprecations are groundwork to reserve keywords for future RFCs — which raises the perennial question of how you measure real-world usage across Composer’s dependency chains.
Infrastructure, the Website, and the Next Generation
The PHP infrastructure has been converted to an Ansible-based repository over the last year and a half (largely by Derick, with help from Joe), replacing a wild mix of individually maintained servers — one was still running FreeBSD 4.3. They’ve also migrated to a new CDN, which brought surprises: a default one-month cache, ignoring the query string in cache keys, and even dark/light mode being an organization-wide setting rather than per-user.
On the website side, everything currently lives in a single root directory of 1999-vintage code, and there’s a long-pending patch to restructure it. The PHP Foundation’s ambassadors program — with speaking, marketing, and research streams — aims to make the very techy php.net homepage speak to CTOs and newcomers about who uses PHP and why it’s a thriving project (only 31-ish years old, versus C’s 60).
The conversation closes on caretakers and the next generation of contributors. Triage, they stress, doesn’t require deep internals knowledge — just reading reports to see if they still make sense is hugely valuable. Security and infrastructure access necessarily stay gatekept for trust reasons, and both agree a bus factor of one (or even two) isn’t good enough. Chris admits he’s struggling to name people who are both nice and know infra.
Links from the show: Join us live in Discord — discord.phparch.com * Watch live on YouTube — youtube.com/phparch * PHP Tek Conference 2027 — Call for Papers now open * PHP Arch Swag Store — store.phparch.com * Xdebug — and Xdebug Cloud for shared debugging * Magazine discount code ALIVE3* — three free months on an annual digital subscription
Host:Chris Miller* X: @ccmiller2018 * Mastodon: @miller@phpc.social * Bluesky: @ccmiller2018.bsky.social * PHPArch.me: @miller
Mike Page* Mastodon: @MikePageDev@phpc.social * PHPArch.me: @mikepagedev
Streams:* + Youtube Channel + Twitch
Connect & HirePHP Architect Website
Twitter/X
Mastodon
Hire PHP DevelopersLooking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – the team is available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
Displace
Infrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
OurCVEs
Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs
CodeRabbit
Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.
PHP Architect Consulting
Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor
PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on.
https://www.phparch.com/consulting/
Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
Join Us Live Next WeekYoutube Channel
Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com
The post PHP Alive and Kicking 2026.08.04 appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast – July 30, 2026Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling
Time travel is real, birds aren’t. The gang argues about Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, boiling rocks, and stones (the weight kind), then gets into PSR-3 logging, the PHP ecosystem, AI slop bug reports, Codeberg’s anti-AI stance, and Laravel Cloud’s scale-to-zero magic. Fahrenheit, Boiling Rocks, and Byte-Ordering Dates
The show opened with Joe admitting he jumbles her hours, minutes, and seconds — and getting mocked by Europeans for a cache-control header PR on the PHP website. That kicked off a tangent about how the American month-day-year ordering is, as Sara put it, “middle-endian” nonsense that makes no sense as a byte ordering.
From there the crew tumbled down a rabbit hole of measurement units. Joe planted his flag on Fahrenheit as the human-centered temperature scale, while Sara argued that if you stop being “speciesist” about it, water-based Celsius wins. The debate somehow escalated into whether rocks boil, with Google eventually schooling everyone that molten rock vaporizes north of 3,000°C (5,400°F), and a callback to British “stones” as boomer energy nobody younger than half a century actually uses.
Proper Logging with PSR-3
Joe walked through Marco Pivetta’s blog post on proper logging with PSR-3, praising it as a great write-up on injecting loggers via dependency injection and the “some logs are better than no logs” philosophy. A common trap Marco calls out: apps stuffed with beautifully descriptive info-level logs that nobody ever sees because production never runs in info mode.
The big selling point of sticking to a PSR-3-compatible interface is minimal dependencies — instead of pulling in three or four packages and wiring up a pile of configuration, the upstream decisions are already made for you. Holly pushed back on the ergonomics of $this->logger->error() feeling heavy for every log call, which spun off a delightfully unhinged RFC pitch: built-in emoji functions where the emoji logs an error and logs a panic.
The Ecosystem Is Why People Stay
The hosts pushed back on the recurring “PHP needs feature X because language Y has it” argument. Sara’s take: if another language is genuinely the better tool, nothing stops you from using it — and revamping PHP’s onboarding process is a far better way to attract newcomers than chasing features would-be developers may never even use.
Holly cut to what everyone had glossed over: the ecosystem. You can write Swift on the server with Vapor, but you won’t have the libraries. Whatever you need in PHP, it already exists. A listener even pointed Joe at Brent Roose’s Tempest framework mid-stream to solve a code-highlighting problem on his blog. That gravitational pull of “whatever you need, it’s here” is what keeps people in the PHP orbit.
AI, Layoffs, and Graybeards
Sparked by Gemma’s blog post “Infrastructure and Other Paradoxes” — where an LLM cheerfully suggested folding four brand-new tools (Terraform, Nix, NixOS, Guix) into a team that’s expert in none of them — the crew dug into where AI helps and where it hurts. The consensus: AI is a force multiplier for research and analysis, but it can’t replace the human judgment of knowing what not to ship.
Joe brought up an Inc.com article claiming 55% of leadership now regret their major layoffs, with companies like Ford rehiring graybeards because nobody left knew how the software worked. Holly noted this cycle isn’t new, just operating at a terrifying new scale, and Sara emphasized that AI accelerates shipping crap just as easily as it accelerates shipping good work — you still have to fundamentally understand the changes you’re applying.
Codeberg’s Anti-AI Stance & the Slop Bug Report Problem
Holly introduced Codeberg — the nonprofit, community-led GitHub alternative built on Forgejo — and its new policy banning AI/vibe-coded contributions, including a clause flagging work disproportionate to a project’s contributor count. The hosts respected the position but worried it might spell the end of Codeberg, since experienced open-source folks lean on AI tooling (like partner CodeRabbit and traditional static analyzers) as force multipliers.
That led into Sara’s frustration with AI-generated security slop. Daniel Stenberg shut down Curl’s bug bounty program over reports where someone’s own test program deliberately creates RCEs and blames Curl. The fix, Sara argued, is a one-paragraph “elevator pitch” summary — and a plea to maintainers to mark every slop report as spam so GitHub eventually bans the account. The group riffed on adversarial AI (two Claude contexts checking each other, like Apple Intelligence verifying sports-game summaries) as a defensive triage layer, while acknowledging people are simply too dumb to run “double-check this before submitting.”
Laracon: Laravel Cloud Scale-to-Zero
Eric was off at Laracon, which meant peak morale at PHP Architect. The coolest announcement, in Joe’s view, was Laravel Cloud’s scale-to-zero: your entire stack — app server, Valkey, and MySQL — can scale down to nothing when idle and spin back up in under 500 milliseconds on the next request. That’s a potential game-changer for side projects with bursty, uneven traffic and no DevOps army.
Holly and Sara were skeptical about how you cold-start a MySQL instance that fast — almost certainly a pause/resume rather than a true cold start. Other Laracon news: a Laravel language server protocol for better autocomplete and code navigation, plus managed queues that also scale to zero and only wake when a job needs firing.
Links from the show:* PHP Tek 2027 — Chicago, April 27–29, CFP open through end of August * Join us live in Discord * PHP Arch Swag Store * Proper logging in PHP with PSR-3 * Codeberg — Software development, but free * Tempest by Brent Roose * infraslopture and other paradoxes * companies regret laying off humans for AI
Hosts:Joe Ferguson* Mastodon: @joepferguson@phpc.social * PHPArch.me: @svpernova09
Sara Golemon* Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social
Holly Schilling* Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt
Streams:* + Youtube Channel + Twitch
Connect & HirePHP Architect Website
Twitter/X
Mastodon
Hire PHP DevelopersLooking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – the team is available for consulting, infrastructure work, and code review.
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
Displace
Infrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
OurCVEs
Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs
CodeRabbit
Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.
PHP Architect Consulting
Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor
PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on.
https://www.phparch.com/consulting/
Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
Join Us Live Next WeekYoutube Channel
Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com
The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.30 appeared first on PHP Architect.
PHP Podcast – July 23, 2026Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon, and Holly Schilling
Eric got ousted from his own show (no pants required), Holly’s elephants are lost somewhere in the U.S., and the crew talks SIMD, PHP 8.6 feature freeze, and whether AI can actually create. Also, socks. A Show Without Pants: The Guest Takeover
This week Eric got booted from his own podcast while John was off doing something more important, leaving Holly, Sara, and Producer Joe to run the show. The gang wasted no time reminding everyone that the correct Discord URL is discord.phparch.com — not phparch.com/discord — a mistake that ended up as tomorrow’s task list item for Joe.
There was plenty of housekeeping to get through: PHP Tek 2027 lands April 27th through 29th in Chicago, the CFP is open, and the call for papers closes August 31st. Holly, ever the deadline enthusiast, admitted she loves “the sound deadlines make as they whoosh by,” which set the tone for much of the episode.
And yes, the swag store now has PHP Architect socks. There was extensive debate about whether the socks are safe for large-footed individuals, whether banana-for-scale photos are needed, and whether Eric should post feet pics. DuckNizzle bought some socks. We are also, apparently, SOC 2 certified.
The Great Elephant Migration
Sara’s elephant herd is currently scattered across the United States, most of them somewhere between Chicago and California courtesy of U-Haul. With import forms to Portugal not yet ready, the plush pachyderms are taking a scenic detour west before eventually making their way overseas.
Only six elephants are currently on hand, and technically none of them are PHP Architect elephants — though one is a PHP Roundtable elephant, prompting the recurring wish that someone should bring that podcast back. Spoiler: they might, more on that later.
Sara also shared she’s been in intensive foreign language classes every day, getting up at 7 a.m. while not falling asleep until 2 a.m., all while assembling a Prusa Core One+ 3D printer kit with roughly 300 pages of instructions and hundreds of tiny pieces.
SIMD and Data Science in PHP
Joe brought a blog post from Mitchell Hashimoto arguing that everyone should know SIMD — Single Instruction, Multiple Data. It’s a form of parallel computing that can dramatically speed up large data processing, offering 8x, 10x, even 100x improvements when you’re working with hundreds of thousands or millions of records. It won’t help you loop over a 100-item array, but it might supercharge a FlowPHP parquet file with millions of rows.
Sara pushed back on how deep into the processor this discussion goes, noting that floating point math already flows through the SIMD registers — so in a very narrow sense, you’re already getting SIMD support in current PHP. Reordering instructions safely is another matter entirely (see: Intel’s history of getting it wrong).
The conversation tied back to Florian Englehart’s “One Billion Rows” talk at PHP Tek 2025, and Holly mentioned her monomorphic generics work now supports variadic types — meaning a typed vector structure could, with a bit of JIT work, make SIMD-style patterns possible in PHP’s near future.
PHP 8.6 Feature Freeze Is Coming
Code freeze for PHP 8.6 lands August 11th — less than three weeks out. The release managers admitted they flubbed and missed the five-week warning email that should have gone out July 6th, though the four-week email did go out July 13th and a two-week warning is coming next Monday.
Sara, one of PHP’s previous release managers, was philosophical about people panicking at the deadline: you’ve had twelve months, your lack of planning is not the release team’s problem. An idea to move the feature freeze date was floated and quickly shot down — the cadence has been established for years, and one missed email doesn’t change that.
Larry got a shout-out for suggesting internals push all new business to September so 8.6 can get properly tested. And Holly declared, in full Benevolent Dictator mode, that the next release simply has to be 9.0 — too many big features to ship for a mere 8.7.
AI, Copyright, and Whether Machines Can Create
The crew dug into AI, starting with the news that a judge approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright lawsuit settlement — with roughly two-thirds going to lawyers. On the brighter side, Anthropic is giving a million dollars to Code Crew, a Memphis nonprofit building a physical location to offer less-predatory career training.
Holly described using AI to implement a new module dereference operator (colon greater-than) that exists nowhere but her own machine, arguing the AI isn’t stealing when it follows precise instructions to generate novel syntax. Sara countered that the LLM isn’t creating so much as blending existing functionality — following instructions rather than inventing.
The debate turned philosophical: how much truly new code have humans written in the last decade? We stand on the shoulders of giants, we’re “thinking meat sacks,” and Sara cheerfully accepted the label of “biased anti-clanker bigot.” The Terminator is coming for Larry first, apparently.
Foundation Transparency and Household Jira
The PHP Foundation published a quarterly progress report authored by Elizabeth, detailing what every contractor and employee has been working on. Holly praised Elizabeth for bringing the transparency the Foundation had long lacked, since devs have a lot of autonomy and asking them what they’re doing is, apparently, the worst.
This spiraled into a discussion of household project management — one host’s wife is a project manager, another family installed a Jira instance for their home that the programmer husband absolutely hates, and there’s a gamified house-cleaning app that Holly refuses to adopt for fear she’ll either become obsessed or start a fight over losing.
The episode wrapped with talk of finally reviving PHP Roundtable (scheduling permitting), Longhorn PHP acceptances, and gentle ribbing that Eric and John are “getting up in years” and can’t perform with their usual podcast consistency. There’s a pill for that.
Links from the show:* PHP Tek 2027 — Chicago, April 27–29, CFP closes August 31 * PHP Architect Swag Store — now with socks * Join our Discord
Hosts:Joe Ferguson* Mastodon: @joepferguson@social.social * PHPArch.me: @svpernova09
Sara Golemon* Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social
Holly Schilling* Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt
Streams:* + Youtube Channel + Twitch
Connect & HirePHP Architect Website
Twitter/X
Mastodon
Hire PHP DevelopersLooking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
Displace
Infrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
OurCVEs
Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs
CodeRabbit
Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.
PHP Architect Consulting
Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor
PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on
https://www.phparch.com/consulting/
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The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.23 appeared first on PHP Architect.
PHP Podcast – July 16, 2026Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon, and Holly Schilling
Joe hosts with Sarah and Holly while running on no sleep. The PHP Tech 2027 CFP opens, a fake PHP 9 pitch appears, we crown Holly the accidental main character of internals, and everyone agrees dark mode flashing white is a war crime. PHP Tech 2027 CFP Is Open (And Yes, the Year Is Right This Time)
The big news kicking off the show is that the PHP Tech CFP for 2027 is live and open. You can find it over at Sessionize under php-tech-2027, and unlike a certain demo from the previous week, the date on it is actually correct. There was a brief moment where it displayed 2007, but the team fixed that rather quickly, so credit where credit is due.
The crew marveled at the fact that we are somehow less than six months out from 2027, which spiraled into a conversation about kids getting learner’s permits, full beards showing up on children who were toddlers just yesterday, and whether anyone’s offspring might actually submit a talk. Helldivers came up. Freedom was spread. And there was a gentle suggestion that SoCalKid and their newly engaged fiancé should be sent the CFP URL immediately.
Meanwhile, PHP Tech 2026 videos are rolling out on PHP Tech TV. There are currently 37 available with more still processing thanks to some technical and room issues at the event. Several talks are completely free, including Joe’s talk on modernizing DevOps, Kaylin’s “Modernize Your Old School Endpoints with HTMX,” and both of Ben Ramsey’s talks.
Working Groups, Discord, and the People Who Actually Care
The conversation turned to the internals process and Ben Ramsey’s working group proposal on the internals mailing list, which the crew encouraged everyone to actually read. The idea of giving working groups some autonomy and even decision-making power drew broad agreement as a way to produce more fully-fleshed RFCs rather than one person’s implementation of a giant feature.
A recurring point of confusion is the reference to “Discord conversations” in RFCs. There is no official PHP.net Discord, but phpc.chat will get you to the Discord (and previously the bridged IRC). The PHP Internals channel is where a lot of discussion happens, though far from the only place, and there are also the PHP Foundation and new Foundation Ambassadors channels.
Big appreciation went out to the moderators keeping that Discord spam-free and troll-free, with a special shout to Tiffany, who is an absolute machine at helping people, pointing them in the right direction, and posting top-tier cat pictures in the pet flexing channel.
The recurring theme: decisions are made by the people who show up. Silence is acquiescence, and if you have issues, speak up. Holly famously just showed up in internals one day, started talking, and they let her stay.
This Week in Internals and the Co-Scientist Show
Joe wanted to highlight Artisan Build’s YouTube channel, specifically their “This Week in Internals” videos. They are fantastic recaps of what’s happening in the internals world, complete with a very light sprinkling of extremely dry comedic timing that lands perfectly.
The videos break down email threads and RFCs into easily digestible summaries of what people are arguing over, then poke a little fun at the sillier arguments. A weekly recap drops regularly and it’s consistently great content for anyone curious about internals.
The crew was also impressed by the host’s ability to nail every name pronunciation on what seems like the first try, which spiraled into Holly’s confession that she has a hard memory limit on names learned after kindergarten. Anyone new is simply “out of bounds.”
Holly’s Fake PHP 9 Pitch: Structs, Modules, and Surfaces
Holly walked through a blog post on eventuallywrong.com featuring a fake PHP 9 pitch full of flagship features she’s prototyped. It kicked off with extensions, which she discovered didn’t exist while trying to build the Longhorn app in native PHP, landing her at the top of that internals video.
Next came structs, which started as an attempt to build tuples (turns out full structs were easier). They’re Swift-style value types with strong typing, and after some grumbling at Larry, she reworked things to support interfaces and traits, leaning into composition over inheritance.
Modules got the PHP-style treatment: a simple module definition, a public interface declaration, and a new internal visibility level that lets members be accessed within the same module. No autoloader modifications required, and reflection remains the escape hatch as always.
Finally, surfaces — a keyword that adds a perpendicular-to-visibility scope. A method can belong to a surface, and callers simply declare they want to use that surface of the class. Holly performance-tested it: no impact if unused, minimal impact if used. She also spent a good chunk of the show against friend classes, arguing they’re leaky, unrestricted, and if you’re going to hand out full access to your privates, you shouldn’t have marked them private in the first place.
Release Management, Version Stats, and Upgrade Paths
Holly is a first-time PHP 8.6 release manager alongside Matteo Beccati, with veteran Daniel Scherzer (also on 8.5) rounding out the team. She stepped down from RM in a prior election because others wanted the work — a reminder that people stepping up in open source is a rarity worth celebrating. Release management, she noted, is less a social job and more about moving data at the right time and signing things.
The July 2026 PHP version stats got a thumbs up. Looking at the trends, 8.5 is clearly on the rise, 8.4 climbing slightly, 8.3 starting to trend down, and 8.2 falling harder — exactly the curve you want, with the vast majority sitting inside the support window.
Joe shared that upgrading apps from PHP 7 to 8.3/8.4/8.5 has been a much easier lift than the older 7.x hops, thanks to a more consistent release cadence and better deprecation guidance. Holly pushed back on the idea that 5.6-to-7 was ever hard, while Joe pointed out the real pain came from jumping ancient 5.0/5.1 codebases straight to 7 back before Claude existed. There was also a very in-depth debugging tangent about an opcache build flag no longer being needed on 8.5.
Accessibility, Dark Mode Crimes, and the JetBrains Survey
The JetBrains State of PHP survey is open, and everyone should go take it — there’s even a chance to win one of five vouchers. This led to a discussion about whether JetBrains usage is being decimated by AI tooling, with Holly living almost entirely in the terminal with Claude Code these days while Joe remains loyal to PHPStorm and PyCharm.
Sarah, who is going blind and is not joking about it, kicked off a passionate segment on accessibility. Test your apps with a screen reader. Respect font scaling and contrast (F0F0F0 text on white is a genuine crime). Respect the OS toggles for reduced motion, because autistic users and others depend on them and apps routinely ignore them.
The crew then united around dark mode etiquette: the only reasonable default is system-selected, and the white flash between two dark-mode pages is caused by JavaScript-based theme switching instead of sane CSS selectors. It is, universally agreed, the worst.
The episode closed on eye-tracking privacy (Apple Vision Pro good, Oculus terrifying), heat maps, and a laptop-camera-covering tangent that got appropriately unhinged before Joe called it on that bombshell.
Links from the show:* PHP Tech 2027 CFP — Now open on Sessionize * eventuallywrong.com — Holly’s fake PHP 9 pitch * phpc.chat — Get to the PHP Discord * store.phparch.com — Now with socks
Hosts:Joe Ferguson* Mastodon: @joepferguson@social.social * PHPArch.me: @svpernova09
Sara Golemon* Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social
Holly Schilling* Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt
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The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.16 appeared first on PHP Architect.
PHP Podcast – July 9, 2026Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon | Guest: Holly Schilling
A PHP RFC for extension methods that PHP definitely should have had by now. Holly Schilling, Uninvited but Welcome
Holly was originally just planning to heckle from the Discord chat room. She had about 45 minutes’ notice before the show that she’d be on camera instead, which she took in stride — minus the PHP swag shirt she would have worn if she’d known. Eric is happy to hand her the show; she’s been in the backstage feed and notes that the zero-latency view means she actually gets the jokes, unlike the 3–5 second delay that makes jokes land after everyone’s moved on.
PHP Tek 2027 CFP: Now Open
The call for papers for PHP Tek 2027 is open, and the deadline is end of August. This year, PHP Tek is doing three tracks: two traditional PHP-focused tracks and a third rotating track that will change each day — one day dedicated to AI talks, one to Laravel talks, one to DevOps talks. The goal is to get submissions in and the schedule published early enough that attendees can put it in their budget before their fiscal year closes. Holly (who now manages the submission review) has a note for repeat submitters: if your talk was accepted and given at a previous PHP Tek, don’t submit it again. Also: bot submissions from automated systems that spam every CFP in SessionEyes are a real problem, and Holly’s job is to filter them out before the blind evaluation round begins. The evaluation process is designed to keep Eric and John out of the loop until after the first pass — so they can’t accidentally influence votes for speakers they already like.
PHP Tek 2027 Hotel + Conference Bundle
Brief reprise from last week: the hotel and conference bundle is available at phptek.io — one price that includes your conference pass, hotel nights, and conference lunches and breakfasts, designed to make the ask to a manager or CFO as simple as possible. Eric is working on a short video to explain it rather than just dumping pricing on the homepage.
Joe Ferguson at Merge PHP — Today
Joe Ferguson — PHP Architect team member and co-release manager of PHP 8.6 — is presenting at Merge PHP immediately after this podcast wraps. His talk: “Ansible for PHP Developers: Configure, Deploy, and Update Your Infrastructure.” Eric was trying to reach Joe for an hour before the show (Joe was apparently already in the Merge PHP stream watching the podcast). If you’re listening after the fact, the recording may be available.
Holly’s RFC: Class Extension Methods
Holly has spent the past week doing a caffeine-fueled deep dive into PHP internals C code and has come out the other side with a draft RFC and working proof-of-concept code for class extension methods — a feature she kept assuming PHP had, tried to write, and found didn’t exist. The idea: you can add methods to an existing class without subclassing it. Swift has this, Kotlin has it, C# has it. The canonical PHP example is something like adding isWeekday() or isWeekend() to DateTimeImmutable — you get to call it as an instance method on the native class, not on a subclass you’d have to propagate everywhere. Under the hood it’s syntactic sugar: the implementation in C# is a static method with the class passed as the first parameter, and Holly is taking a similar approach. No performance penalty — a few people have already tested it. Early concern about performance impact has not materialized.
The feature naturally extends to scalar methods, which Laracon’s Levi Koop and others have discussed: the ability to write $str->length() instead of strlen($str). This part is harder because $this in PHP must always be an object, so scalars need special hooks to work as receivers. That complexity is why Holly broke the implementation into three phases. She has posted GitHub Gists rather than a formal PHP wiki RFC so far — she submitted for a wiki account yesterday and is waiting to hear back. Outlook has been eating her PHP internals mailing list emails (treating new posters as spam), so she’s in the process of switching to a new email address. Joe Ferguson is in the chat offering to help expedite the wiki account. Feedback is coming in, changes are being made, and this is moving toward a formal RFC.
Holly’s motivation is pure: she built this for herself because she needed it. Eric quoted himself from the “PHP Ugly Days” era, telling the community that if there’s a feature you want and nobody’s building it, it’s on you. Holly has resented and credited that line in equal measure ever since.
NativePHP Mobile: Holly Is Building the Longhorn App
Holly has started building a conference app for Longhorn PHP using NativePHP Mobile. Eric’s reaction ranges between excitement (someone’s doing it!) and mild betrayal (it’s not for PHP Tek). Holly also submitted a talk to Longhorn PHP about what actually distinguishes a real native mobile app from a website wrapped in an app shell — and the answer isn’t the language, the transitions, or the scroll animations. It’s state management. Native apps treat the local device copy as authoritative or at minimum authoritative enough that you’re not reaching the server for every interaction. Web apps don’t do this; native apps have to. Holly has real-world context here: one of her earlier jobs was building the Chicago Sun-Times native app and then white-labeling it for 70+ publications across the country. She says she’d never do that again. Every single publication has brand style guidelines, logo clearance zones, and color adjacency rules. Multiply that by 70 and you start to understand why white-labeling at scale is a nightmare.
Longhorn PHP CFP — Closes Tomorrow
The call for papers for Longhorn PHP is open through tomorrow night (July 10). It had been briefly reported as closed last week; it got extended. If you want to speak at Longhorn, head to cfp.longhornphp.com now. The conference is in Austin at the Holiday Inn.
WordPress: Stewardship, Backward Compatibility, and the Laravel Fork Question
Holly’s experience white-labeling apps prompted a broader conversation about WordPress — specifically a genuine acknowledgment of how technically impressive it is that a WordPress installation can look completely different from any other, at the scale WordPress operates. Eric respects the technical accomplishment but has longstanding criticism of how WordPress positioned itself in relation to the PHP community. His view: WordPress was the Laravel of its day, arguably the thing that kept PHP relevant for a decade. But rather than leaning into the broader PHP ecosystem and pushing the language forward from the inside — the way Facebook tried to (even if it eventually forked into HHVM/Hack) — WordPress was laser-focused on backwards compatibility. The result was that PHP internals couldn’t move as fast as it might have because WordPress’s enormous install base created a de facto veto on any change that would have required sites to update. Holly pushed back gently: WordPress’s backwards compatibility constraint wasn’t really a choice they could have made differently given the scale of self-hosted installs and third-party plugins. Eric acknowledges the constraint while still wishing they’d engaged more with internals. The Hack language comes up as a counterpoint: HHVM/Hack, whatever its ultimate fate, was the provocation that woke up PHP internals. PHP 7’s massive performance improvements and modern type system features largely came out of internals saying “Hack has a point, let’s do this properly.” Almost every good idea from Hack eventually got ported into PHP. Eric’s darker hypothetical: if Laravel today had an existential need for a PHP feature that internals kept rejecting, and Taylor Otwell forked PHP — that could be a genuine death blow to the ecosystem. Holly thinks the community would survive; Eric thinks the math on maintaining a language fork is nastier than it looks.
Composer, Supply Chain Security, and the 48-Hour Question
A viewer asked whether Composer has a way to skip packages released in the last 48 hours when running an update — the motivation being supply chain attacks, where a compromised package gets published and immediately picked up by the next composer update run. Eric’s short answer: not natively, and the real mitigation is to not run composer update blindly. Holly points out the harder version of this problem: languages like Swift allow pre-compiled binary packages, which are far scarier than source packages because you can’t even do a code review. Eric mentions that Packagist and Composer have been doing real work on supply chain integrity (covered on the show a few weeks back). If you want the deeper treatment, Eric Mann’s upcoming Security Corner column in the July issue of PHP Architect covers exactly this — Composer and the PHP supply chain. Look for it in the next few weeks.
Eric’s Laptop Saga, Chapter N
The new “clean install” MacBook Pro that Eric has been using to solve his connectivity issues dropped partway through the show. Eric switched to his older laptop (which was still running and still connected), but couldn’t get his camera to re-appear in the stream source list, couldn’t add himself back, and eventually gave up and wrapped up audio-only. John and Holly carried the last few minutes. The older laptop that never dropped is now, apparently, the better one. Eric is running out of explanations and considering a career in farming.
Links from the show:* PHP Tek 2027: Call for Speakers @ Sessionize.com * PHP RFC: Extension Methods · GitHub * PHP RFC: Scalar Extension Methods · GitHub * php-rfc_Extensions+Visibility.md · GitHub * Longhorn PHP Conference 2026
Host:Eric Van Johnson* X: @shocm * Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social * Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social * PHPArch.me: @eric
John Congdon* X: @johncongdon * Mastodon: @john@phparch.social * Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social * PHPArch.me: @john
Guest:Holly Schilling* PHP internals contributor; author of the Surfaces RFC and now Class Extensions RFC * Primary mobile developer; built the PHP Tek 2026 conference app; building the Longhorn PHP app in NativePHP Mobile * Based near Chicago, IL
Streams:* + Youtube Channel + Twitch
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The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.09 appeared first on PHP Architect.
PHP Podcast – July 2, 2026Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon
Eric’s new laptop won’t share its screen. John lost a fight with a leaf blower. PHP 8.6 alpha dropped. 100+ people showed up to make PHP seem cool again. Normal show. Eric’s Fresh Install and the Screen That Wouldn’t Share
Eric has been wrestling with connectivity drops for weeks, and this week he took drastic action: a fresh install on an older MacBook Pro with almost nothing on it. He installed exactly three apps — 1Password, Ghosty, and Tailscale — and is running Discord and Slack through Safari to minimize variables. The irony is immediate: the new setup can’t share its screen during the show, something that was a central part of what they planned to cover. He hits every macOS security dialog in real time, can never quite get there, and eventually gives up and goes verbal. The fresh-install theory is that one of his previously installed apps was causing his streaming dropouts. Whether it worked is TBD, but at least he stayed connected.
PHP Architect July Issue — Published Live
John published this month’s magazine live on the show — walked through the admin steps in real time, which Eric found appropriately chaotic. The monster feature article this month is “Building Secure REST APIs for Healthcare Applications with PHP and Laravel,” running 21–22 pages, making it likely the longest single feature they’ve ever run without splitting it across issues. The page count is mostly because of the volume of code samples. It will not be the free article of the month, which Eric admitted immediately creates extra work for John. Eric also noticed for the first time that Edward Bernard has an ad running in the magazine (Wizard’s Lens, his book) — which has apparently been there for a while.
John’s Week: Leaf Blower, Racquetball, and AI Pull Requests
John started the week by getting hit in the eyebrow with a leaf blower. The full story: his wife wanted the leaves blown off the top of the pergola, he figured out he could push the leaf blower up there and let gravity return it to his hand like a boomerang, it worked three times, and on the fourth attempt it went straight to the eyebrow. He’s on enough medications that he bruises instantly. He then played racquetball, found himself in an extended session with an 80-year-old and a much better 35-year-old, took a hard ball to the back of the leg, and is expecting to regret it tomorrow. On the development side: he’s still reviewing pull requests where roughly 80% of the code is written by Claude and submitted by non-developers. He talked to one of the authors about it, and the author’s response was that he does learn from John’s feedback — he reads it, tells Claude about it, and asks Claude not to do it again. John is… accepting of this.
Laravel Verbs, Eloquent Hooks, and a Client Project That May Be Back
A previous client project — originally built in Laravel 7, heavily involving event sourcing — may be reviving. Eric spent the last few weeks using Claude to walk the application from Laravel 7 to Laravel 13, then tackle the event sourcing library migration. The original library is no longer maintained, so Eric and Claude moved everything to Laravel Verbs. Eric has a nuanced view of Verbs: it’s great for developers new to event sourcing because it’s approachable, but gets a little murky when you start talking about projections in Laravel terms versus event sourcing terms. To police CRUD operations and ensure nothing bypasses Verbs, Claude suggested hooking into Eloquent’s lifecycle callbacks — so whenever any CRUD action is called on a model, it first fires through Verbs. Eric loved this; John had reservations, arguing it inverts the paradigm (the change causes the event rather than the event causing the change). Eric’s counterpoint: the Eloquent hook fires before the model touches the database, so Verbs still logs first, and it solves the very real problem of a developer seeing a venues table and just using the model directly. Holly, watching in the Discord chat, noted that Verbs calls the aggregate root a “state” rather than using the standard event sourcing term “root” — which is exactly the kind of terminology drift Eric finds frustrating about Verbs, even as he thinks it’s the right tool for this project. The client meeting itself went well; their CFO grasped event sourcing immediately because it maps perfectly to accounting ledgers, where every entry is permanent and any correction requires its own entry and explanation.
Laracon and NativePHP Mobile
Laracon is July 28–29, and Eric is going. NativePHP Mobile is holding a one-day mini-conference immediately after on July 30 — “Vibes with Native PHP” — for an additional $129. Eric is likely not staying for it due to flight constraints, but he used it as an excuse to hype NativePHP mobile again. He’s been talking about this project for a while and still hasn’t shipped a real app with it himself, which frustrates him. His pitch: if you’re a PHP developer who has ever wanted to do mobile development and found the barrier too steep, this is the moment. NativePHP is pushing more native functionality on both iOS and Android, the license fees are gone, and the project is in its second wave. There is also an ongoing campaign — which Eric is actively encouraging in this episode — to pressure Holly Schilling into building the PHP Tek conference app using NativePHP Mobile.
Surfaces RFC & Friends RFC
Holly’s Surfaces RFC came up briefly — Eric wanted to discuss it more but they ran out of time, mostly because Holly was busy in the Discord getting called out for doing a conference app for Longhorn PHP. The short version: the Friends RFC (in discussion) allows a class to explicitly grant another class access to its private properties without requiring inheritance — the canonical use case is a builder that needs to set private fields on an object without requiring setters, which would make those fields effectively public. Holly’s Surfaces RFC extends the idea to roles rather than just specific classes. Eric and John agree they need to have Holly on as a guest to actually discuss it properly — a plan they’ve now made twice.
Chris Miller Submits a PR to PHP Core
Their team member Chris Miller found a bug in the PHP JIT compiler: code that goes through the JIT was returning a different result than the same code without the JIT, specifically with the bitwise NOT operator. He opened an issue, looked at the C code, figured out the cause, and submitted a pull request to fix it. The same fix already existed for the bitwise OR and XOR operators — this PR adds the bitwise NOT. Eric loves this kind of story: a developer using PHP, noticing something odd, going all the way to the C source to understand why, and contributing a fix rather than just filing a bug. There’s a known separate JIT issue in PHP 8.5 tracing mode affecting background workers (not the main application); Eric upgraded his client’s app to 8.5 and ran into it, and believes it’s addressed in 8.5.7.
PHP 8.6.0 Alpha 1 — Released Today
Joe Ferguson — their friend, PHP community member, and occasional target of friendly on-air ribbing — released PHP 8.6.0 Alpha 1 today. Joe is one of the release managers for PHP 8.6, with Daniel Scherzer serving as the senior release manager (the PHP Foundation recently updated the title from “mentor”). Eric and John congratulated Joe warmly, mostly by pointing out that Chris Miller is smarter than Joe. Joe was apparently on the PHP Foundation Ambassador call as well.
PHP Tek 2027: Hotel + Conference Bundle
PHP Tek 2027 is doing something new this year: an optional bundle where you can buy your conference ticket and hotel stay together. Two options — three nights (Mon–Wed) or four nights (Mon–Thu). The pitch: one all-in number is easier to take to a manager or a CFO than itemizing conference pass, lunches, breakfasts, and lodging separately. Eric and John are explicit that they make less money doing it this way; the benefit is that your room is booked immediately when you pay, so you won’t forget and find rooms sold out later. Breakfast in the room is free for the first person, half price for a second person in the same room. Dinners and travel are still on you.
CFPs: Find-a-Conference and Longhorn PHP
Someone in the community pointed Eric to a website aggregating call-for-papers listings across conferences — not PHP-specific, and not geographically locked to the US. Useful if you’re a speaker (or want to be one) and want to see where to submit. Eric mentioned it as a resource for PHP community members to speak at non-PHP conferences, which the community generally doesn’t do enough. Specifically: Longhorn PHP’s CFP is open until July 10 at cfp.longhornphp.com. That’s one week from now as of this recording.
PHP Foundation Ambassador Program
Eric joined the PHP Foundation’s new Ambassador Program and attended its first meeting. He expected a modest turnout — the meeting had 114 people in the call. Three of them were from PHP Architect. Elizabeth Barron organized it and was apparently worried nobody would show up; Eric was not worried. The program’s focus is getting the word out about PHP to new developers and making the language feel more approachable — something the community has been trying to do for years without a coordinating structure. There was one slide. They talked about the slide for the whole meeting. There are multiple programs under the Foundation you can sign up for (including security-focused groups); you sign up via a Google Form, you don’t have to speak in the meetings, and it’s open to anyone regardless of PHP skill level. Eric’s one note to Elizabeth: please don’t make the coordination mechanism a mailing list.
AI Note Takers — The Open Meeting Debate
Eric’s AI note taker was running in the Foundation meeting, and some attendees objected. Eric is a defender of AI note takers: he gets summaries, can reference meetings later, and gets a Monday morning digest of the previous week. His position is that banning agents from an open, public meeting doesn’t prevent recording — it just means the notes disappear into the ether. For genuinely sensitive work — he describes a government-adjacent client where developers need background checks and fingerprints — he’s fully supportive of restrictions and will pull his agent without complaint. For an open PHP Foundation meeting, he finds the concern disproportionate, and says if agents are banned outright, he’d stop participating because he doesn’t have the bandwidth to rely on someone else’s notes. He also acknowledged that the irony was not lost on him: the same AI capability that makes voice recording feel threatening also makes it trivially easy to deepfake a voice regardless of whether an agent was in the room.
Ethical Ads
Tessa mentioned a developer-focused advertising platform called Ethical Ads on a recent Live and Kicking episode. Eric found it interesting enough to flag on the show — it’s an ad network specifically for developer-focused content that emphasizes privacy and non-tracking approaches. Eric and John are always trying to figure out better ways to promote PHP Architect, the magazine, and PHP Tek; this may be worth exploring as an alternative to standard ad networks that don’t align well with developer sensibilities.
Links from the show:* OurCVEs.com — Track your security posture across GitHub repos and servers (created by Artisan Build) * Laravel Magazine — Under PHP Architect * PHP Tek 2027 — Conference + hotel bundle available (phptek.io) * Longhorn PHP CFP — Open until July 10 * Ethical Ads — Developer-focused advertising * PHP Tech TV — PHP Tek 2026 talks * PHP Architect Discord * Surfaces RFC · GitHub * JIT: Inline ZEND_BW_NOT by millerphp · Pull Request #22560 · php/php-src · GitHub * All active call for papers – CfP Watch * The PHP Ambassador Program is Open — The PHP Foundation — Supporting, Advancing, and Developing the PHP Language * The PHP Foundation Special Interest Groups General Interest Form
Host:Eric Van Johnson* X: @shocm * Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social * Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social * PHPArch.me: @eric
John Congdon* X: @johncongdon * Mastodon: @john@phparch.social * Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social * PHPArch.me: @john
Streams:* + Youtube Channel + Twitch
Connect & HirePHP Architect Website
Twitter/X
Mastodon
Hire PHP DevelopersLooking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
Displace
Infrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
OurCVEs
Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs
CodeRabbit
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Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
Join Us Live Next WeekYoutube Channel
Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com
The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.02 appeared first on PHP Architect.
PHP Podcast – June 25, 2026Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon
Eric and John are back. Sara and Holly did a better job. Eric’s computer still hates him. Eric’s Connectivity Saga: A Possible Resolution
For weeks, Eric has been dealing with a maddening streaming issue — he could see and hear everyone, but nobody could hear or see him. It only happened during Zoom, Slack huddles, and Restream sessions. No one could explain it, including Eric. The apparent fix came by accident: while helping his kid troubleshoot a similar issue, Eric pulled up his own DNS settings and discovered they were only pointing to his router with no upstream fallback. He manually added Google’s 8.8.8.8 and Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 — and for the first time in weeks, had zero issues all week. Does DNS explain streaming dropouts? Almost certainly not. Does it appear to have fixed it? So far, yes. Computers are stupid. Eric needs to retire and open a landscaping business.
Two Weeks Off: Road Trip, Pittsburgh, and a Graduation
John took the family on a road trip that included national park hikes, biking across the Golden Gate Bridge, and a swing through Universal Studios. Eric headed to Pittsburgh, technically West Virginia, for his niece’s high school graduation. Eric came away impressed with how much Pittsburgh has changed: what was once a gritty steel city has quietly become a genuinely beautiful place. He’s half-serious about looking at it as a future PHP Tek location.
Sara and Holly: The Better Hosts
Eric and John opened with a heartfelt thank-you to Sara Golemon and Holly Schilling for covering the last two weeks. John’s take: Sara and Holly showed up with documents, had a plan, and ran a tighter show. He’s joking about handing over the keys — mostly.
PHP Architect Takes Over Laravel Magazine
Here’s the announcement Eric was teasing before the break: PHP Architect has taken over the Laravel Magazine brand. It was originally a Statamic, which Eric rebuilt from scratch over the past couple of weeks. No plans to create a print magazine — it will remain a web-only publication. Eric is thinking about opening it to outside contributors, and there’s a real possibility of a dedicated Laravel column eventually appearing in the PHP Architect magazine. The new consulting section Eric built for the site looks sharp enough that John immediately pointed out it looks better than what’s currently on phparch.com.
Foam Burner Feature: Proof of Concept Wars
John got a big feature in Foam Burner across the finish line — or at least mostly across — recorded a screencast, and sent it off to the people who care. The immediate response: a list of compliance concerns and edge cases. This is a proof of concept. John is sympathetic, having just had to tell Eric the same thing about Laravel Magazine. The cycle of building something you’re proud of and then having someone find the things that aren’t done yet is a universal developer experience.
Code Review in the Age of AI — What’s the Point?
John is in a strange spot: he’s doing careful code review on pull requests written entirely by Claude, submitted by non-developers. His detailed, educational feedback — the kind meant to help a developer understand why something was done a particular way — is just being fed back into Claude to generate revisions. Nobody’s learning anything. An incident during his vacation reinforced why the reviews matter: someone deployed AI-generated code that wasn’t well reviewed, it broke overnight, and the team had to revert it the next morning. His position: keep reviewing, even if the audience is an AI. But the nature of what you’re reviewing for has to change — you’re no longer nurturing a developer; you’re being a gate. Eric’s broader point: if you’re a developer who cares about the craft, don’t let AI make you lazy. Learn from how it implements things. Ask it why. The thing that will differentiate developers when AI really matures is genuine understanding of what the code is doing — and that only comes from staying curious.
PHP Generics RFC — Closed
The Generics RFC was shut down while Eric and John were away, and Eric is genuinely disappointed. The proposal was for syntax-only generics: type annotations that static analyzers could read but that would be stripped at the opcode level, meaning no runtime performance impact. The goal was to standardize the generics syntax so PHPStan, Psalm, and other tools all read it the same way — right now they each implement their own dialect. Sara voted no (she explained her reasoning in the June 17 episode). Joe abstained. Whether an active abstain requires a deliberate action or is the default for a non-vote is apparently still a matter of some debate.
PHP Tek 2026 Talks Now on PHP Tech TV
Talks from PHP Tek 2026 are being uploaded to phptech.tv. Subscribers can watch the full library. Several speakers have given permission to make their talks free, and Ben Ramsey’s is one of them. John also added video progress tracking to the platform — it now remembers how far into a video you’ve watched.
This Week in PHP Internals (Artisan Build)
While looking for a PHP Internals podcast that Nuno appears to have started (possibly in connection with the PHP Foundation after PHPverse), Eric stumbled on a different show: This Week in PHP Internals, hosted on the Artisan Build site, with four episodes out. Eric doesn’t know who runs it but says it’s good — short, focused, and gets to the point. He’s also still looking for confirmation on what exactly Nuno’s new podcast is and who it’s for. For reference: the original PHP Internals podcast was Derick Rethans’ show, which he hasn’t updated in four or five years. The ecosystem growing new shows is a good sign.
PHP Friends RFC — Under Discussion
John has been watching the friends RFC, currently in the discussion phase. The idea: a class can explicitly declare another class as a “friend,” granting it access to private properties without requiring inheritance. The canonical use case is a builder pattern — a UserBuilder that needs to set private fields on User without a thousand public setters, and without making those fields non-private. Holly, in chat, noted that the friend model is a special case of a “surfaces” model she proposed a few years back. She also shared that Swift doesn’t have protected at all (just public and private) — something she initially found frustrating but has come to appreciate. Eric admits he’s been guilty of abusing inheritance over the years and is more thoughtful about it now. The RFC is still under discussion; no vote yet.
Eric Drops PHPStorm — Falls Back in Love with Vim
Eric canceled his JetBrains All Products subscription. Not because there’s anything wrong with PHPStorm — he’s explicit about that — but because he’s been doing so much work via Claude Code and making only targeted, smaller changes himself that the license fee no longer made sense. His replacement workflow: VS Code for some things, Vim for others. The Vim part was supposed to be supplemental. Instead, his terminal has taken over: it went from a panel alongside PHPStorm to taking up two-thirds of his screen to now living on its own separate virtual desktop. He’s running Spotify in the terminal. He briefly ran Slack in the terminal. He uses Tmux religiously. “I have problems,” he acknowledged. He would not take this back.
Links from the show:* Laravel Magazine — Now under PHP Architect * PHP Tech TV — PHP Tek 2026 talks now uploading * PHP RFC Wiki — All RFCs under discussion * PHP Tek 2027 — April 27–29 (phptek.io) * PHP Architect Discord
Host:Eric Van Johnson* X: @shocm * Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social * Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social * PHPArch.me: @eric
John Congdon* X: @johncongdon * Mastodon: @john@phparch.social * Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social * PHPArch.me: @john
Streams:* + Youtube Channel + Twitch
Connect & HirePHP Architect Website
Twitter/X
Mastodon
Hire PHP DevelopersLooking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
Displace
Infrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
PHPScore
Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore
CodeRabbit
Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.
Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
Join Us Live Next WeekYoutube Channel
Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com
The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.25 appeared first on PHP Architect.
PHP Podcast – June 17, 2026Hosts: Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling | Guests: Paul Reinheimer & Sean Coates
Eric and John are still locked in the basement. Sara is literally on a boat in Spain. Normal show, totally normal. Sara Broadcasts from a Harbor in A Coruña
Sara is joining this week’s show from a marina in A Coruña, northwest Spain — in the Galicia region, where they speak Galician (not quite Spanish, not quite Portuguese). It’s 1am local time and the boat is visibly rocking on camera. Holly is holding down the fort from Chicago. This is what Sara calls pirate radio, except one of the pirates is actually on a boat.
Meet the Guests: Paul Reinheimer & Sean Coates
Paul Reinheimer and Sean Coates are PHP veterans from an earlier era — both were closely involved with PHP Architect around 2005–2010, back when Sara was already a PHP core contributor and the community was small enough to fit in one bar. Paul now runs Wonder Proxy, a service that lets you test your website’s behavior from locations around the world (checking GDPR banners, geo-targeted content, checkout flows, etc.), and is also building a startup called StudioWorks — business management software for creative studios, with an invoicing product and a proposals product in development. Sean is based in Montreal and has been spending time at a local hackerspace called Food Lab, where he got pulled into MeshTastic and MeshCore mesh networking, and is now surrounded by vintage computers, including a PDP-11 and five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks.
The Quarter-Million-Line Commit
Paul committed 250,000 lines of code directly to Wonder Proxy’s repo without a PR last week — and he’s not particularly sorry about it. The context: it was a pre-generated SQLite amalgamation file (all of SQLite compiled into a single C file), which Wonder Proxy is now checking in as a pinned static dependency rather than regenerating each build. Paul’s argument is unanswerable: you cannot meaningfully review 250,000 lines of generated C code in a PR. If there’s something malicious in there and you’re good with C, you could hide it in parameterized defines and no one would see it. The right approach, which Paul landed on, was creating a separate package with its own CI — and including the command to regenerate the amalgamation so reviewers can verify the output themselves, not just stare at the diff.
Measuring Wrong — Sean’s Rant
Sean has been ranting about this for 10–15 years and it hasn’t gotten less true: companies systematically measure things that make them look good and avoid measuring things that make them look bad. A marketing team adds a spin-to-win wheel to the homepage and celebrates their 1% sales increase. Nobody measures how many people found the wheel so obnoxious they immediately left. Cookie and GDPR banners are the same story — they go up, they’re never removed, and the conversion impact is never tracked because nobody wants to report bad news up the chain. Sean’s broader point: an epidemic of motivated measurement is a big part of why the web is as bad as it is.
PHP in 2026 vs. PHP Then — What’s Still Working
Paul’s honest take: the LAMP stack still works great. In 2004 you could build a productive web application with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP — and you still can today. The fundamental approach is the same. Having since done Ruby at Stripe and other languages elsewhere, Paul keeps coming back to how much sense the PHP model makes to him. The longevity is the feature, not a bug. Wonder Proxy’s web app — built in server-side Swift using the Hummingbird framework — returns pages in under 50 milliseconds almost always and under 30 most of the time, with almost no client-side JavaScript. Server round trips are fast. The web doesn’t have to be seven seconds.
Swift Concurrency and What PHP Could Learn
Sara asked Sean — who has used Swift on the server for StudioWorks — what he’d want to see in PHP’s threading model. His answer: anything the compiler can enforce beats anything you have to remember yourself. Swift’s concurrency model has the compiler reject code that would allow a thread to trample on a sendable object after it’s been sent off. You find out about threading mistakes at compile time, not when corrupt data shows up in production. Sean’s verdict: an early warning system for threading problems is 10,000 times more valuable than discovering them too late. PHP’s async/await path is cooperative task switching (not true threading), which avoids some of these issues but can still deadlock if someone forgets to hand off control.
Composer, require_once, and Supply Chain Security
The chat raised whether anyone still uses require_once in the PSR-4 world. Sara’s answer: PHP.net does — it doesn’t use Composer at all, because the site needs to be framework and library agnostic. Grep for require_once across typical vendor dependencies and you’ll find around 100 instances still in the wild, mostly inside packages like Doctrine. The supply chain security conversation from there: Composer’s lock file pins to specific hashes, which is what you want — but a lot of projects don’t commit their lock file, and pinning to a version tag isn’t enough because tags can be updated if someone takes over a GitHub account. To really be safe, pin to a specific commit hash. It’s a pain to maintain, but it’s much harder to fake.
The PHP Foundation — The Biggest Change in PHP
Paul called out the PHP Foundation as the single biggest change in PHP since he and Sean were actively involved. Having an organization that can receive money from individual supporters and use it to fund core PHP work has been talked about since before PHP had package management. The foundation now has over 1,000 individual supporters — including Rasmus Lerdorf himself, which Sara found funny. Paul and Wonder Proxy support it financially; Wonder Proxy also holds a private Packagist account as an indirect way to fund Composer development. Sara works directly with the foundation on PHP core. Elizabeth Barron (from last week’s show) is doing exceptional work moving it forward.
PHP.net Redesign and the Dark Mode Problem
Sara copped to a php.net rabbit hole: she tried to implement dark mode for the site and succeeded everywhere except code samples. PHP’s built-in highlight_string() function has hard-coded colors that assume a light background, and there’s no way to override them. Sara wrote the patch to make the colors configurable at the internals level, then realized it should actually be a separate PHP project, then lost track of caring about it because it became yak shaving. On the redesign side: the foundation ran a competition to redesign the releases page (the per-version page with changelogs and download links), and the results look much better. The downloads page has been getting more beginner-friendly content — how to actually get PHP running, not just a reference manual. There are homepage mockups being iterated on as well.
What Talk Would You Give?
Sara asked both guests what conference talk they’d give if they were speaking today. Paul: marketing for developers. Too many developers believe “if you build it, they will come,” and AI is making this worse — the barrier to shipping something that looks professional has dropped so far that the noise floor is rising fast. Hollywood knows to spend as much on marketing as on production. Paul doesn’t claim to be good at marketing, but he thinks someone should be giving this talk at every developer conference. Sean: reliable deployment and supply chain integrity — specifically how to actually control the path from git to production without sneaking in vulnerabilities. Containers have helped, but there’s still a lot of infrastructure that fetches things at build or request time that is genuinely dangerous.
PHP Tek 2027
The PHP Tek 2027 website is live at phptek.io. No date confirmed on air, but the site is up and people should keep an eye on it.
Links from the show:* Wonder Proxy — Test your website from around the world * PHP Tek 2027 — phptek.io * The PHP Foundation — Support PHP development * PHP Architect Discord
Guest Hosts:Sara Golemon* Currently sailing in the Atlantic (broadcasting from A Coruña, Spain) * PHP core contributor; code contributor via the Curl project (which means she technically has code on Mars)
Holly Schilling* Primary mobile developer; built the PHP Tek 2026 conference app * Based near Chicago, IL
Guests:Paul Reinheimer* Founder, Wonder Proxy — test your website’s geo-targeted behavior from 300+ global locations * Founder, StudioWorks — business management tools for creative studios (invoicing & proposals) * Former PHP Architect team member; wrote a book on PHP and APIs
Sean Coates* Based in Montreal; regular at the Food Lab hackerspace * MeshTastic/MeshCore mesh networking enthusiast; vintage computer collector (PDP-11 era) * Former PHP Architect team member and longtime PHP community contributor
Streams:* + Youtube Channel + Twitch
Connect & HirePHP Architect Website
Twitter/X
Mastodon
Hire PHP DevelopersLooking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
Displace
Infrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
PHPScore
Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore
CodeRabbit
Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.
Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
Join Us Live Next WeekYoutube Channel
Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com
The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.17 appeared first on PHP Architect.
This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John talk about NativePHP Mobile, EAV Database Models, PHP Tek 2026 CFP coming to and end, Fun Simpson API, and more…
Links from the show:
- Thank You to Our Early Adopters – NativePHP
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model
- https://x.com/ShaneDRosenthal/status/1976110984998814062
- PHP Tek 2026: Call for Speakers @ Sessionize.com
- Android/Inertia Update – YouTube
- Open Discussion, Wed, Oct 29, 2025, 7:00 PM | Meetup
- The Simpsons API – Free API for Simpsons Data
The PHP Podcast streams the recording of this podcast live, typically every Thursday at 3 PM PT. Come join us and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
X: https://x.com/phparch
Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com
Discord: https://discord.phparch.com
Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/
Host:Eric Van Johnson* X: @shocm * Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social * Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social
John Congdon* X: @johncongdon * Mastodon: @john@phparch.social * Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social
Streams:* Youtube Channel * Twitch
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
DisplaceInfrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
PHPScorePut Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore
Honeybadger.ioHoneybadger helps you deploy with confidence and be your team’s DevOps hero by combining error, uptime, and performance monitoring in one simple platform. Check it out at honeybadger.io
Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
The post The PHP Podcast 2025.10.09 appeared first on PHP Architect.
In this episode, Scott talks with Daniel Scherzer about his work as a PHP contributor and PHP 8.5 release manager.
Links:* https://displace.tech/ * Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx * Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt
Daniel’s Social Media:* https://scherzer.dev/ * LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-scherzer-520539263/
Scott’s Social Media:* Website – https://scott.keck-warren.com/ * Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/scottkeckwarren.bsky.social * LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-keck-warren-91689810/ * Mastodon – https://phpc.social/@scottkeckwarren
PHP Architect Social Media:X: https://x.com/phparch
Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com
Discord: https://discord.phparch.com
Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/
Streams:* Youtube Channel * Twitch
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
DisplaceInfrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
PHPScorePut Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore
Honeybadger.ioHoneybadger helps you deploy with confidence and be your team’s DevOps hero by combining error, uptime, and performance monitoring in one simple platform. Check it out at honeybadger.io
Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
The post Community Corner: PHP 8.5 Release Manager Daniel Scherzer appeared first on PHP Architect.
From wannabe teen hacker to 20+ years in PHP, AI Lead at Laravel, and producing Laravel Boost – come and hear about Ashley Hindle and his journey.Laravel Boost Deep DiveMakes AI code better with context-aware docs, guidelines, and tools
Auto-detects your packages/versions (Laravel, Pest, Filament, Tailwind, etc.)
Born from Ashley’s earlier project “Croft”
Customizable with your own guidelines
The Big AI DebateWill AI take our jobs? Short answer: No
Long answer: Developers who master AI will outcompete those who don’t
“Vibe coding” will create a new market for fixing AI-generated code
Code review becomes more critical than ever
Bonus TopicsWhy “boring code” is the best code
Time-based vs. value-based pricing in the AI era
Wild idea: Fully AI-managed app from user feedback to production
Watch to learn how to work smarter with AI while staying irreplaceable!
PHP Architect Social Media:X: https://x.com/phparch
Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com
Discord: https://discord.phparch.com
Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/
Streams:* Youtube Channel * Twitch
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
DisplaceInfrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
PHPScorePut Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore
Honeybadger.ioHoneybadger helps you deploy with confidence and be your team’s DevOps hero by combining error, uptime, and performance monitoring in one simple platform. Check it out at honeybadger.io
Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
The post PHP Alive And Kicking: Episode 4 – Ashley Hindle appeared first on PHP Architect.
This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John talk about Scott’s PHP 8.5 review, Alive and Kicking’s first live stream, PHP Foundation’s call for design, the new Laravel Forge, and more…
Links from the show:
- What’s New in PHP 8.5? (Release Date + Must-Know Features) | PHP Architect
- PHP Alive and Kicking 3: Special Guest Gina Banyard | PHP Architect
- PHP TekTV – Streaming
- Call for Designs: Refresh the PHP 8.5 Release Page — The PHP Foundation — Supporting, Advancing, and Developing the PHP Language
- Everything You Need to Know About the New Forge & Laravel VPS – Laravel – The PHP Framework For Web Artisans
- Reddit – The heart of the internet
The PHP Podcast streams the recording of this podcast live, typically every Thursday at 3 PM PT. Come join us and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
X: https://x.com/phparch
Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com
Discord: https://discord.phparch.com
Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/
Host:Eric Van Johnson* X: @shocm * Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social * Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social
John Congdon* + X: @johncongdon + Mastodon: @john@phparch.social + Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social
Streams:* Youtube Channel * Twitch
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
DisplaceInfrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
PHPScorePut Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore
Honeybadger.ioHoneybadger helps you deploy with confidence and be your team’s DevOps hero by combining error, uptime, and performance monitoring in one simple platform. Check it out at honeybadger.io
Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
The post The PHP Podcast 2025.10.02 appeared first on PHP Architect.
Shownotes:* https://thephp.foundation/ * https://wiki.php.net/ * https://wiki.php.net/rfc * https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation * https://gpb.moe/about.html
Streams:* Youtube Channel * Twitch
PartnersThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
DisplaceInfrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
PHPScorePut Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore
Honeybadger.ioHoneybadger helps you deploy with confidence and be your team’s DevOps hero by combining error, uptime, and performance monitoring in one simple platform. Check it out at honeybadger.io
Music Supplied By: Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
Get PHP Architect Merch at our Store https://store.phparch.com/The post PHP Alive and Kicking 3: Special Guest Gina Banyard appeared first on PHP Architect.
This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John talk about Special guest James Seconde, CTO who don’t like PHP, AI, and more…
Links from the show:
- Reddit – The heart of the internet
- 2025 DORA State of AI Assisted Software Development | Google Cloud
- TechMids Conf – A community-driven tech conference
The PHP Podcast streams the recording of this podcast live, typically every Thursday at 3 PM PT. Come join us and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
X: https://x.com/phparch
Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com
Discord: https://discord.phparch.com
Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/
Host:Eric Van Johnson* X: @shocm * Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social * Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social
John Congdon* + X: @johncongdon + Mastodon: @john@phparch.social + Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social
Streams:* Youtube Channel * Twitch
PartnersThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
DisplaceInfrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
PHPScorePut Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore
Honeybadger.ioHoneybadger helps you deploy with confidence and be your team’s DevOps hero by combining error, uptime, and performance monitoring in one simple platform. Check it out at honeybadger.io
Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/
Get PHP Architect Merch at our Store https://store.phparch.com/The post The PHP Podcast 2025.09.25 with Guest James Seconde appeared first on PHP Architect.
This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John discuss NativePHP bringing everything, including the Kitchen Sink, PHP Foundation announcement of the SDK for MCP, Nuno’s Explanation of Laravel MCP, PHP 8.5 Pipe Operator, the Supply Chain issue with NPM, and more.
Links from the show:
- GitHub – NativePHP/kitchen-sink-mobile: NativePHP for mobile demo app
- Announcing the Official PHP SDK for MCP — The PHP Foundation — Supporting, Advancing, and Developing the PHP Language
- Introducing Laravel MCP – YouTube
- PHP 8.5 Adds Pipe Operator: What it means — The PHP Foundation — Supporting, Advancing, and Developing the PHP Language
- ctrl/tinycolor and 40+ NPM Packages Compromised – StepSecurity
- 20 Popular npm Packages With 2 Billion Weekly Downloads Compromised in Supply Chain Attack
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.R.G.U.S.
- npm debug and chalk packages compromised
- GitHub – phparch/phptek-2026
- GitHub – basecamp/omarchy: Opinionated Arch/Hyprland Setup
- Omarchy 2.0 – YouTube
The PHP Podcast streams the recording of this podcast live, typically every Thursday at 3 PM PT. Come join us and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
X: https://x.com/phparch
Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com
Discord: https://discord.phparch.com
Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/
Host:Eric Van Johnson* X: @shocm * Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social * Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social
John Congdon* X: @johncongdon * Mastodon: @john@phparch.social * Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social
Streams:* Youtube Channel * Twitch
PartnerThis podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners
DisplaceInfrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/
PHPScorePut Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore
Honeybadger.ioHoneybadger helps you deploy with confidence and be your team’s DevOps hero by combining error, uptime, and performance monitoring in one simple platform. Check it out at honeybadger.io
The post PHP Podcast: 2025.09.18 appeared first on PHP Architect.
In this episode of “PHP Alive and Kicking,” Mike and Chris engage in a discussion with Sara Golemon, a prominent PHP Internals developer and release manager.
The conversation kicks off with Sara sharing her unique journey into PHP development, which began unexpectedly from a tech support role for the US government, ultimately leading her to become a significant contributor to the language. Sara elaborates on her work with HHVM and its influence on PHP’s evolution, highlighting her current efforts related to composable functions and her participation in PHP Foundation meetings.
The PHP Foundation, established a few years ago, plays a crucial role in funding PHP development, addressing the bus factor problem, and enhancing stability by supporting dedicated developers.
The episode delves into the anticipated PHP 8.5 release, discussing its expected general availability and key new features such as ‘clone with’ and the pipe operator. Additionally, Sara addresses the complexities of exception handling in PHP, particularly in the context of deeply nested function calls and where exceptions should be caught in a call stack. As the conversation progresses, several new features in PHP 8.5 are categorized into S-tier, A-tier B-tier D-tier (deprecations), including enhancements to property visibility, error handling, and core functionalities.
The discussion also touches on the features introduced in PHP 8.3, such as graphim-aware Levenstein distance and persistent cURL share handles, alongside a review of deprecations. Sara highlights ongoing changes in the language, including the deprecation of constant redefinition and the incrementing of non-numeric strings, providing historical context for these decisions. Other deprecated features discussed include the http\_response\_header local variable and the backtick operator, as well as unexpected syntax elements like using semicolons to terminate case values in switch statements.
Finally, the episode concludes with Sara discussing the continuous improvement of PHP, the crucial role of the foundation in supporting developers, and the ongoing efforts to enhance transparency in the project’s governance.
Throughout the show, a few links were discussed:
The PHP Foundation – https://thephp.foundation/
The Open Collective Page – https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation
The PHP8.5 Todo Page – https://wiki.php.net/todo/php85
The RFC List – https://wiki.php.net/rfc
The post PHP Alive and Kicking Episode 2: Sara Golemon appeared first on PHP Architect.
In this episode, we speak with Dwayne McDaniel about exposed secrets in our GitHub repositories and figuring out when we’ve been compromised using Honeytoken.
Links:
Dwayne’s site – https://dwayne-mcdaniel.com/
Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report – https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/
GitGuardian Blog – https://blog.gitguardian.com/
HoneyBadger.io – https://HoneyBadger.io
Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx
Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt
Scott’s Social Media:
Website – https://scott.keck-warren.com/
Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/scottkeckwarren.bsky.social
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-keck-warren-91689810/
Mastodon – https://phpc.social/@scottkeckwarren
The post Community Corner: Exposed Secrets with Dwayne McDaniel appeared first on PHP Architect.
This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John talk about Fixes to PHPTek.tv Login, New PHP Architect Merch Store, Wire-Live the Livewire InPerson Event, Perks to Caddy Web Server, PHP Stream Server, and more…
Links from the show:
- PHP TekTV – Streaming
- PHP Architect
- Longhorn PHP
- Wire Live – A Chill & AWESOME Livewire Community Event
- Comparing Caddy to Nginx and Apache – DEV Community
- Introduction — Infection PHP
- https://phpstreamserver.dev/
- GitHub – theHocineSaad/laravel-error-ai: A Laravel package that adds Ask AI buttons to exception pages, one click opens ChatGPT or Claude with a pre-filled, Markdown-formatted error for instant troubleshooting.
The PHP Podcast streams the recording of this podcast live, typically every Thursday at 3 PM PT. Come join us and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
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Host:Eric Van Johnson* X: @shocm * Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social * Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social
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The post PHP Podcast: 2025.09.04 appeared first on PHP Architect.
In this episode, Scott talks to Keith “Danger” Casey about being called “Danger”, his talks at php[tek] 2024, and the benefits of going to conferences.
Links:
caseysoftware.com
LinkedIn Learning – https://www.linkedin.com/learning/instructors/keith-casey
Tickets to php[tek] 2024 – http://tinyurl.com/tek-2024-tickets
The post Community Corner: Keith “Danger” Casey appeared first on php[architect].
In this episode, Scott talks to Mark Niebergall about his talks at php[tek] 2024, preparing to do a 3-hour tutorial track talk, his work as a PHP-FIG Secretary, and the current opening as a PHP-FIG Secretary.
Links:
PHP-FIG: www.php-fig.org
Tickets to php[tek] 2024 – http://tinyurl.com/tek-2024-tickets
The post Community Corner: Mark Niebergall appeared first on php[architect].
In this video, Scott talks to Nils Adermann about composer, Private Packagist, and Nil’s talk at php[tek] 2024.
Links:
Private Packagist – https://packagist.com/
Tickets to php[tek] 2024 – http://tinyurl.com/tek-2024-tickets
The post Community Corner: Nils Adermann appeared first on php[architect].
In this video, Scott talks to James Seconde about what services Vonage provides developers and his talks at php[tek] 2024.
Links:
Tickets to php[tek] 2024 – http://tinyurl.com/tek-2024-tickets
The post Community Corner: James Seconde appeared first on php[architect].
In this video, Scott talks to Tim Lytle about tips for new conference attendees and his talk on Docker at php[tek] 2024.
Links:
Dev Friday Show – https://devfridayshow.com/
Tickets to php[tek] 2024 – http://tinyurl.com/tek-2024-tickets
The post Community Corner: Tim Lytle appeared first on php[architect].
Scott talks to Larry Garfield about his talks at php[tek] 2024 and the open source projects he’s created and maintained for the community.
Links:
Larry’s Blogs – https://www.garfieldtech.com and https://peakd.com/@crell
Serde – https://github.com/Crell/Serde
AttributeUtils – https://github.com/Crell/AttributeUtils
Tickets to php[tek] 2024 – http://tinyurl.com/tek-2024-tickets
The post Community Corner: Larry Garfield appeared first on php[architect].
Scott talks to Scott McAllister from ngrok about some of the features ngrok can provide to its users and Scott’s talk about webhooks at php[tek] 2024
Links:
ngrok – https://ngrok.com/
Webhooks.fyi – https://webhooks.fyi/
Tickets to php[tek] 2024 – http://tinyurl.com/tek-2024-tickets
The post Community Corner: ngrok’s Scott McAllister appeared first on php[architect].
In this episode, Scott talks to April Wensel from Compassionate Coding about empathy in coding and her keynote at php[tek] 2024.
The post Community Corner: Interview With April Wensel of Compassionate Coding appeared first on php[architect].
John and Eric share more of the day-to-day behind-the-scenes work that goes on at php[architect].
This episode of php is sponsored by JetBrains PhpStorm
We discuss php[tek] 2024, writing for the magazine, and what is coming in the next release of php[architect] magazine.
Join the Discord at https://phpa.me/discord
Subscribe to the Magazine Today
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Twitter* @phparch=> ‘Official PHP Architect’ * @phptek => ‘php[tek] Conference’ * @johncongdon=> Host John Congdon * @shocm=> Host Eric Van Johnson
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The post php[podcast] Episode 23.12.1 appeared first on php[architect].
Interview With Eric Mann Release Manager PHP 8.3In this episode, Scott talks with Eric Mann about his experience as one of the PHP 8.3 Release Managers and writing his book PHP Cookbook.
Note: this transcript was transcribed by AI and then edited for clarity.
Scott Keck-Warren:
Hello developers, and welcome to the php[architect] community corner, where we have conversations with members of the web development community. I’m your host, Scott Keck-Warren, and today we’re talking with Eric Mann about being a release manager for PHP 8.3 and his new book PHP Cookbook.
Eric Mann is a well-established cybersecurity, software, and infrastructure engineer, having led multiple teams of various sizes in the private sector. Eric has experience architecting highly-available and resilient SaaS platforms, scalable e-commerce websites, and industry-defining AI/ML operations. In addition to leading technical teams, Eric frequently lectures at events on both scalable engineering and cybersecurity. He also publishes books on programming and secure software design. Eric is a member of both ISACA (Information Systems Audit and Control Association) and OWASP (Open Worldwide Application Security Project) and is a release manager for PHP 8.3.
I wanted to start out today and ask you about your experience as one of the release managers for PHP 8.3.
Eric Mann
Okay. Cool. Yeah. The experience has been fantastic thus far. It’s been a really supportive community, making sure that we get everything taken care of as quickly and as reliably as we can.
One of the things that is really interesting, I did not understand the PHP release process before I started this. I knew we had release managers. I knew we had a release process, but I didn’t really understand what it looked like. So understanding that we cut the release or package the release on one day. On the next day, people will bundle the release for various distributions, and then on the third day we will announce it actually made me feel a lot better just knowing that everybody works from very disparate time zones. And I was really concerned about calendar coordination.
So one of the biggest things I learned was both what the release process looked like, but also just how well suited it is for asynchronous operations and remote work. The fact that I am on the US West Coast and the rest of the release managers are not even in the US, it’s been amazing to coordinate with folks across borders and make sure that we can do things both across borders and across time zones. And as far as how seamless things are from the outside perspective, you can’t tell. Everything is just nice and smooth, and the operation moves forward perfectly well. And I think that’s been amazing and fantastic to learn and see from the inside.
Scott Keck-Warren:
So it kind of sounds like the whole process is set up to be asynchronous.
Eric Mann
It very much is. The way things will typically work is in a release week at some point in time on Tuesday, you will build the release, make sure everything is ready to go, tag the release and then email to tell everybody, hey, the release is ready. Please go ahead and run your builds for Debian and other operating systems, Windows and whatnot.
Sometime on Wednesday, the builders will run their builds and say, hey, here are the builds. They’ll check to see if anything unexpected happened and then let people know where the builds live. And then on Thursday, at some point in time, the release manager will go through and post the announcement for the release, showing where the hash checksums live, where the signatures live, where the binaries live, and all of the compressed artifacts. But all of these happen at different times and everything’s coordinated completely asynchronously via email.
I have now personally managed releases from three separate time zones from Portland, where I live on the West Coast. I’ve gone to the East Coast for work because my office is on the East coast and actually packaged PHP from a hotel room on my laptop, and then most recently was on vacation with my family in Hawaii, and from my hotel room in Hawaii was able to package a release again, exact same process, regardless of where you are, because everything is mediated over email. But it works very well with the asynchronous nature of the work.
Scott Keck-Warren:
So how much time is required of you as one of the release managers?
Eric Mann
It’s actually not that huge of a time demand pulling the release together. The longest thing is compiling PHP, both in threadsafe versus non threadsafe and validating that all of the tests run.
Honestly, I could queue up the release, run the scripts. Maybe 15 minutes later I’m ready to alert the mailing list that the builds are ready. But the process is pretty well streamlined because it’s build the release, sign the release, upload the packages to downloads.php.net, and then alert the release manager mailing list to let everybody know that it’s done. So maybe 15 minutes. The longest was half an hour because I was having network issues.
And then on Thursday, coming back to actually publish the release and announce it, that takes a little bit longer. Not because of the process, but because of the builds in the background. So when you publish an update to the Php.net website or to the QA website, you have to wait up to an hour for the job in the background to actually build the website and make sure that everything is available before you email internals and say, hey everybody, the release is ready to go. You really want to wait for it to be visible on the website before you tell everybody that you released it.
Scott Keck-Warren:
Once you create a release of PHP 8.3, are you then responsible for handling all of the bug requests that come in?
Eric Mann
Not directly. That’s typically managed by the community as a whole, just with the standard release process. So we have when the alphas and the betas went out, we went into a feature freeze. And then there are no new features, no new RFCs in that version, but there can still be bug fixes. And all of those things will go through the typical release cycle on the PHP source GitHub repo, making sure that everybody’s testing and validating and then merging things in as appropriate. Currently, because we’re this far into the release process, things will be merged into the master, the mainline branch to go into PHP 8.4 when its alpha starts up here pretty soon, and then they’re also ported into 8.3 to make sure we get the same bug fixes, but that’s the same feature development bug fix workflow that every version manages. Every version follows all through GitHub.
Scott Keck-Warren:
Can you tell us a little bit about how you were picked to be a release manager?
Eric Mann
Yeah, this all happened through the internals mailing list. So the call for candidates went out. Three of us put our names forward and said, hey, we’re interested in doing this. I’d also put my name forward for PHP 8.2 as well. So folks who can vote typically vote on RFCs as well. We’re able to rank vote their picks for rookie release manager. And then the PHP community uses the single transferable vote mechanism to actually order who the two rookie release managers are going to be.
If you don’t understand single transferable vote, we are an equal company. Because I did not. I thought I lost the election this last time around because I miscalculated. But there are pretty good Wikipedia articles explaining how it works, and some great scripts that some folks have built that help automate counting the votes and tallying the votes. So single transferable vote. Everything happens on the PHP wiki in the public eye to make it really easy and really transparent to understand who’s being selected and when they’re being selected and who is running from release to release.
Scott Keck-Warren:
What made you want to be a release manager for PHP?
Eric Mann
I love PHP. I have not professionally worked in PHP for my day job for about seven years now, but I still continue to use PHP for every hobby project I have. I continue to write for PHP[architect] magazine, the Security Corner article every month. I continue to speak at PHP conferences, lecture on PHP. Recently just published the PHP cookbook through O’Reilly. It’s my favorite language. It’s where I go to whenever I start a new project, and I wanted to give back to the community because really, PHP is what started me in software engineering in the first place, and I felt like I owed it to the community to help give back.
Scott Keck-Warren:
What have you found to be the most interesting part of being a release manager?
Eric Mann
The most interesting thing about this I mentioned I have released from three different time zones. The nifty thing is I’ve all done it from the same machine. So this is kind of my ode to open source. I use an open source Linux machine as my daily driver at home, and I connect it to the internet with a VPN that is also open source. And then I have multiple laptops that can connect back to my home machine.
So even though I built the releases from three different time zones, they were all done by the same machine, open source machine, open source network connections, and has been really fun to be able to leverage all of these tools that years ago were just kind of pie in the sky ideas that I didn’t think we’d ever figured out. But sitting in a hotel room after eating breakfast before I met with my coworkers, using an old machine to remote into my work machine at home to push a PHP release through jump boxes all the way to downloads that php.net was. It felt like I was living in the future. It was one of the coolest things I’ve done professionally in quite a while.
Scott Keck-Warren:
It’s always amazing to me how in the modern world we have all these abilities to do these kind of remote management, just with internet access everywhere.
Eric Mann
It helps, especially with commit signing. Throughout the release process, the builds are signed with GPG and the commits on the repositories are signed with GPG. And I keep all of my GPG keys secured by the Secure Enclave. The secure hardware on my machine, my physical machine, which meant my remote laptops did not have access to the same cryptographic keys. So networking in remoting in to my primary dev box in order to push that release out was the only way I could do that, and also show that yes, the signatures are valid and they were done by me.
Scott Keck-Warren:
So you just recently released the PHP Cookbook, and I was curious about your experience writing a book .
Eric Mann
It was definitely quite an experience. It took about a year and a half to pull the entire manuscript together. There was a lot of work that I had to do to pull the material in, and a handful of frustrations as I got some of the more advanced topics.
Php itself is remarkably simple, straightforward, easy to use, and that’s one of the reasons why I love it. Some of the packages that we leverage for some more sophisticated features less so.
The most frustrating thing was talking about asynchronous coding in PHP and building all of my examples using these industry standard asynchronous coding frameworks, only to have the frameworks themselves iterate a major version with breaking changes. Literally the day after I sent my manuscript to the technical reviewers to edit it. So all of my technical reviewers went through all of my code samples and said, none of your code works. None of your code is functional. We don’t understand why. Only for me to go back and see between the time I wrote the chapter and the time they received the chapter for review, a major version released that completely changed the entire API, and I had to go back and scrap two months worth of work on a chapter to completely rebuild it, to meet the new API that this platform had released.
That was incredibly frustrating but great from a usability perspective because the newer versions were much more performant, much more streamlined, much more seamless. I think the changes they made were perfect, but trying to document those changes in effectively a third party dead tree edition of documentation that cannot change as the library iterates. Very difficult, very frustrating and had me beating my head against the wall for a couple of weeks trying to figure out a way through it.
Scott Keck-Warren:
I find the interesting thing about the book structure is that it has this problem, solution, and then discussion structure to it, where you talk about a problem, here’s how to solve it. Then you discuss the solution. And how did you figure out what it is that you wanted to talk about in each one of these little mini-articles.
Eric Mann
I took it from a perspective of, here are things that you might want to try to do.
So around strings, what’s something I might want to do with strings or around streams? What’s something I might want to do with streams in PHP? I then turn it into a problem.
So an example with streams. Specifically, I have two streams. How do I copy data from one stream to the other stream, potentially without ballooning memory, because one of the streams might be more or less infinite. And this is something that you might face if you’re building a very large web application with a very long running connection, and you need to generate a very large data stream that needs to go to the PHP output stream. One way you can do this is just by saying echo and just like printing content to the buffer, but eventually you might exhaust PHP memory. I’ve seen other examples where people try to concatenate a string to try to build a very large document, typically XML or something else where you can’t afford for the server to shut down mid transmission.
And again, you’re exhausting memory by just trying to do this. The alternative is to use things like a temporary file stream, and you can write data to that temporary file stream, build your entire document, your entire XML document or Json document to completion. And then you can read that file again and pipe that directly to the output stream, the output, the web client or API client, whatever is reading from that stream is going to get the full content. You’re not going to exhaust memory because none of this is written into memory, it just passes directly through PHP. But that’s also not something that a lot of people are looking for, because they don’t really understand what is the problem that you’re trying to solve. So taking it from the perspective of what is the problem and then what is the solution? And then walk through not just that full implementation, but potential alternatives, helps really illustrate both the technologies and the fundamentals that are going into the solution, as well as other applications you might have for a similar approach down the road.
Scott Keck-Warren:
Is there anything else you’d like to direct our listeners to before you go?
Eric Mann
I can’t think of anything offhand. No.
Scott Keck-Warren:
Thank you again, Eric, for finding some time with us. I have to say another heartfelt thank you to Eric for all of his time today, and thank you for listening to our podcast. If you’re not already a subscriber, make sure you subscribe with whatever your preferred method is so you can get episodes as soon as they’re released, and maybe share this post with a coworker so they can learn from it as well. This podcast is available both as an audio version on the PHP architect website, and a video version on our YouTube channel. This is Scott Keck-Warren, for the PHP Architect Community Corner. Signing off and reminding you to keep listening, keep coding, and keep reading.
Links:
Voting Results: https://wiki.php.net/todo/php83
Single Transferable Vote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
PHP Cookbook: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/php-cookbook/9781098121310/
The post Community Corner: Interview With Eric Mann appeared first on php[architect].
John and Eric share more of the day to day behind the scenes work that goes on at php[architect].
This episode of php is sponsored by JetBrains PhpStorm
Join the Discord at https://phpa.me/discord
Subscribe to the Magazine Today
https://phpa.me/signup
Twitter* @phparch=> ‘Official PHP Architect’ * @phptek => ‘php[tek] Conference’ * @johncongdon=> Host John Congdon * @shocm=> Host Eric Van Johnson
Mastodon* @editor@phparch.social => ‘Official PHP Architect’ * @tek@phparch.social => ‘Official PHP Architect’ * @john@phparch.social=> Host John Congdon * @eric@phparch.social=> Host Eric Van Johnson
:q
The post php[podcast] Episode 23.9.1 appeared first on php[architect].
John and Eric share more of the day to day behind the scenes work that goes on at php[architect].
This episode of php is sponsored by JetBrains PhpStorm
Join the Discord at https://phpa.me/discord
Subscribe to the Magazine Today
https://phpa.me/signup
Twitter* @phparch=> ‘Official PHP Architect’ * @phptek => ‘php[tek] Conference’ * @johncongdon=> Host John Congdon * @shocm=> Host Eric Van Johnson
Mastodon* @editor@phparch.social => ‘Official PHP Architect’ * @tek@phparch.social => ‘Official PHP Architect’ * @john@phparch.social=> Host John Congdon * @eric@phparch.social=> Host Eric Van Johnson
:q
The post php[podcast] Episode 23.8.1 appeared first on php[architect].
John and Eric share more of the day to day behind the scenes work that goes on at php[architect]. This episode of php is sponsored by JetBrains PhpStorm Join the Discord at https://phpa.me/discord Subscribe to the Magazine Today https://phpa.me/signup Twitter @phparch @johncongdon @shocm Mastodon @editor@phparch.social @john@phparch.social @eric@phparch.social
The post php[podcast] Episode 23.6.1 appeared first on php[architect].
John and Eric share more of the day to day behind the scenes work that goes on at php[architect]. This includes a lot of talk on php[tek]. They also talk about the latest edition of the magazine “Box of PHP”.
Join the Discord at https://phpa.me/discord
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The post php[podcast] Episode 23.3.1 appeared first on php[architect].
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The post php[podcast] Episode 23.1.1 appeared first on php[architect].
This month John and Eric discuss some of the greater articles coming in the August 2022 release, “PHP Blueprint”. Articles include Feature contributions “Converting relational database models into a graph” and “Universal Vim”. We also have The Workshop “Blueprinting our Application”, DDD Alley “Exploring Boundaries”, PHP Puzzles “Decimals to Fractions”, Finally “The Dangerous Safety of […]
The post PHP Blueprint appeared first on php[architect].
This month John and Eric discuss some of the greater articles coming in the July 2022 release, “Database Freedom”. We start off with two great feature articles, “Customizing Drupal Feeds For Smooth Migrations” by Doug Groene and “MongoDB and PHP—-A Perfect Match” by Joel Lord. Our monthly columnists have been hard at work as well. […]
The post Database Freedom appeared first on php[architect].
This month John and Eric discuss some of the greater articles coming in the June 2022 release, “Another Bright Idea”. If you enjoy coding in PHP and have a Philips Hue smart bulb, this month’s feature article, ‘Illuminating Smart Light Bulbs With PHP,’ from Sherri Wheeler, is for you. She shares a great package and […]
The post Another Bright Idea appeared first on php[architect].
Ken Marks wraps up his series on working with a Raspberry Pi. Ken has done such a fantastic job taking us through his process of using a Raspberry Pi and writing code on that Pi in a real-life scenario at home. In this final installment, Ken establishes a workflow for sending an accelerometer text message […]
The post One Last Slice appeared first on php[architect].
This month, John and Eric introduce the new Drupal Dab column by Nicola Pignatelli which will be focused on the Drupal CMS system. They also discuss the How to Hack you Home with a Raspberry Pi series is going. Chris Tankersley takes us down the path of licenses with some thoughts on choosing one for […]
The post Testing The Core appeared first on php[architect].
Scott Keck-Warren has a contribution in honor of this month’s World Backup Date, Backups For Beginners. Follow along for some inspiration in making sure you have a complete backup system. Ken Marks continues his series, How to Hack Your Home with a Raspberry Pi, with an article showing how to actually hook up your accelerometer […]
The post World Backup Day appeared first on php[architect].
This month’s release touches on some examples that keep PHP and its community strong, relevant, and a fun language to code. Ken Marks continues his series on using PHP and a Rasberry Pi in a real-world example with Raspberry Pi Part 2 – Installing the LAMP Stack on your Pi. As developers, we live a […]
The post Parallelize Your Code appeared first on php[architect].
As 2021 fades from our memories, we hope that a few of you received fantastic geeky gifts during the holidays. Hopefully, some of those geeky gifts included Raspberry Pis. Over the next few months, we will build a project with one and hopefully inspire you to create something useful for yourself. This is also a […]
The post Domain-Driven Resolutions appeared first on php[architect].
In this issue, Doug Dobrzynski helps us focus while programming with his article, Mindful Programming. While this article isn’t PHP specific, if you take time to digest what he’s talking about, I think you will find that all of us could benefit from using daily mindful techniques. In his article, Lessons Learned from Building a WebSocket […]
The post The Zen Of Mindful Programming appeared first on php[architect].
This month, we dive into Libsodium, discuss gatekeeping, learn more about data access, and why even something that might be considered a “small bug” can cause massive damage. I’m not sure how many people read these Editorials. It’s even been explained to me that this isn’t an “Editorial.” Ha, the joke’s on them; I’m not […]
The post The Art of Data appeared first on php[architect].