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The PHP Podcast 2026.07.23
PHP Podcast – July 23, 2026 Hosts: 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 & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This 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 Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.23 appeared first on PHP Architect.
Community Corner Podcast: Firefly III with James Cole
In this episode, Scott talks with James Cole, creator of Firefly III, an open source personal finance manager. James explains why he built Firefly III after graduating college with student debt, how the rule engine automates transaction categorization, importing bank data with CSV files and third-party connectors like enable banking and GoCardless, and how to get started without importing years of history. Links: Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt James’s Links: Firefly III – https://www.firefly-iii.org/ 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 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/ Partners This 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 https://phpscore.com/ CodeRabit CodeRabbit – Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. https://www.coderabbit.ai/ Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ #phpc #php #communityCornerPodcast #podcast #FireflyIII #PersonalFinance #OpenSource The post Community Corner Podcast: Firefly III with James Cole appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast 2026.07.16
PHP Podcast – July 16, 2026 Hosts: 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 Sara Golemon Holly Schilling Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners 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/ 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. Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.16 appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast 2026.07.09
PHP Podcast – July 9, 2026 Hosts: 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 Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This 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. Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.09 appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast 2026.07.02
PHP Podcast – July 2, 2026 Hosts: 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 & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This 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. Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.02 appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast 2026.06.25
PHP Podcast – June 25, 2026 Hosts: 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 & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This 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 Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.25 appeared first on PHP Architect.
Community Corner: Spec-Driven Development with Holly Schilling
In this episode, Scott talks Holly Schilling about her work on the php tek 2026 mobile app and spec-driven development. Links: Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt Holly’s Links: Discord: TheCodeLorax Mastodon: https://tech.lgbt/@TheCodeLorax Blog: https://EventuallyWrong.com 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 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/ Partners This 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 https://phpscore.com/ CodeRabit CodeRabbit – Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. https://www.coderabbit.ai/ Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ #phpc #php #communityCornerPodcast #podcast #phptek The post Community Corner: Spec-Driven Development with Holly Schilling appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast 2026.06.17
PHP Podcast – June 17, 2026 Hosts: 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 & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This 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 Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.17 appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast 2026.06.11
PHP Podcast – June 11, 2026 Guest Hosts: Sara Golemon, Elizabeth Barron & Holly Schilling Eric and John are out this week — Sara, Elizabeth, and Holly take over. Here’s what they covered: PHPVerse Recap PHPVerse just wrapped up, and Elizabeth was there in Amsterdam. The format is unusual — all speakers are flown to one location, but the audience is entirely virtual. It was a class act: professional TV crew, studio lighting, and a makeup and hair team on site. Around 2,500–3,000 people watched the live stream. Everything was broadcast as one long block; individual talk segments and possibly the documentary trailer will be cut and released separately. The full stream is available now — the PHP documentary trailer (produced by Jet Breeze, covering 30+ years of PHP history) appears around the 2:24:30 mark. PHP Foundation 2026 Strategy Document Elizabeth and the PHP Foundation released their 2026 strategy document the same day as this recording. The foundation gathered community input across numerous conversations and conferences, synthesized it into findings, and has now published a plan for the rest of the year. Key themes: repositioning PHP’s public perception (which Elizabeth calls a solvable problem), creating six special interest groups, and launching an Onboarding Initiative to build a real on-ramp for new PHP developers. Elizabeth’s view is that the two things giving her the most hope for PHP’s future are the passion and expertise of the community, and how good the language itself has gotten. Visit thephp.foundation to read the full document. The Onboarding Initiative One of the six special interest groups the foundation is launching is specifically focused on bringing new developers into PHP. Goals include creating a true learning path (not just a reference manual that assumes existing knowledge), improving educational resources, and potentially working with the php.net website to improve the first-time experience. Holly made the point that PHP’s barrier to entry is genuinely lower than almost any other language — the Hello World program is 11 characters — but that story isn’t being told outside the PHP bubble. New developers are turning to JavaScript as a first language and running into minified spaghetti instead of something approachable. AI Writing PHP — And PHP as a Second Language Holly built the entire PHP Tek conference app backend in Laravel without writing a single line of code herself — AI-generated throughout, which she reviewed and approved. The code held up to peer review at the conference with only minor style nits. She ran it on PHP 8.3 and used modern standards throughout (one piece of feedback: stop using empty()). The consensus: AI models write good modern PHP because of the vast amount of open source PHP they were trained on. The caveat Sara raised is worth thinking about — how much of that training data is PHP 4-era code and WordPress 3 repositories? Either way, Holly’s case for PHP as a second language is strong: low ceremony, low boilerplate, readable syntax, and it’s a language where you can do something useful in minutes. PHP’s Reputation Problem (and Why It’s Fixable) The group dug into PHP’s perception gap — the mismatch between how good the language actually is and how it’s perceived outside the community. Holly’s experience as a mobile developer who recommends PHP to others: the pushback is immediate (“isn’t that slow?”, “isn’t that dead?”). The benchmarks don’t support that reputation — PHP outperforms Python on most comparable workloads — but data alone doesn’t shift perception. Elizabeth’s point is that this is primarily a storytelling and coordination problem, not a language problem, and that the foundation’s repositioning work is exactly aimed at closing that gap. The community has the passion. It just needs to tell the story outside its own bubble. PHP Polling API RFC Sara walked through the RFC for a new Polling API in PHP (wiki.php.net/rfc/poll_API). The short version: PHP currently has five or six different ways to do I/O multiplexing (watching multiple streams and acting on whichever one is ready first), and which one works depends on the OS, available extensions, and PHP version. The Polling API proposal creates a single, unified interface that abstracts all of that. The immediate beneficiaries are async frameworks like Amp PHP, ReactPHP, and Revolt, which currently have to maintain multiple backend implementations to cover different environments. The bigger picture: this is a building block on the path toward true async PHP, likely contributing to something more complete in PHP 9.0. Most app developers won’t use it directly — but the libraries they depend on will. RFCs are all listed at wiki.php.net/rfc. PHP.net: Do As We Say, Not As We Do Sara, who has contributed to php.net, copped to the state of the codebase: some of it dates to the PHP 3 era, there are functions.inc files, and it is very much “do as we say, not as we do.” The historical reason is that php.net used to rely on community-administered mirrors (r-synced servers running everything from PHP 5.1 to 5.6 simultaneously), so modernizing the code was impossible without controlling the runtime. That’s changed with CDN-based load balancing — they can now control what PHP version runs on php.net — and the code has been getting better. But it’s a slow process. PHP Podcasts Past, Present, and Future Holly asked about the PHP Town Hall podcast (Ben Edmonds and Phil Sturgeon), and the group did a quick tour of PHP podcast history. The PHP Roundtable — originally started by Sammy, taken over by Eric — has produced about three episodes. Sara and producer Joe are planning to take it off Eric’s hands and actually do it properly. And Elizabeth announced that the PHP Foundation is launching a new podcast: tentatively called PHP at Scale, hosted by Ben Marx, focused on telling the stories of organizations pushing PHP to its limits. No launch date yet, but there’s already a queue of interested guests. Next Week’s Show — Moved to Wednesday Sara will be on a boat off the coast of Galicia on Thursday, so next week’s episode is moving to Wednesday. Guests will include Paul Reinheimer and (hopefully) Sean Coase — two veterans from PHP’s podcasting past. Elizabeth is going to try to make it work around the Canadian Grand Prix. Mac Mini M4 for Local LLMs Holly picked up a refurbished Mac Mini M4 (16GB RAM, 512GB storage) specifically to run LLM models locally via Ollama. Apple Silicon is a solid choice for this because the unified memory architecture gives the neural cores access to far more RAM than a discrete GPU setup. Sara is waiting for the M5, which is reportedly not coming until fall — and is already resigned to spending too much on it when it lands. Links from the show: PHP Foundation — 2026 Strategy Document PHP RFC: Polling API PHP RFC Wiki — All RFCs Under Discussion Amp PHP — Async framework ReactPHP — Event-driven async PHP Revolt — Event loop for PHP php.net website source code (github.com/php/web-php) PHP Architect Discord Guest Hosts: Sara Golemon Based in Lisbon, Portugal PHP core contributor; code contributor via the Curl project (which means she technically has code on Mars) Elizabeth Barron Executive Director, PHP Foundation Based in Germany Holly Schilling Primary mobile developer; built the PHP Tek 2026 conference app Based near Chicago, IL Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This 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 Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Note: Next week’s show is on Wednesday (not Thursday) with guests Paul Reinheimer and Sean Coase. Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.11 appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast 2026.06.04
PHP Podcast – June 4, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered: PHP Tek 2027 — New Dates, Bold New Format Mark your calendars: PHP Tek 2027 is happening April 27–29 in Chicago, and Eric and John are shaking things up. Rather than a straight three-day PHP conference, next year gets three tracks — two of which are familiar PHP-focused content, and a third specialty track that rotates each day: one day of JavaScript, one day of DevOps, and one day of Laravel. The Laravel track is specifically focused on how developers actually use the framework day-to-day, not a product pitch. Single-day passes will be available, so if you’re only coming for the DevOps or JS day, you’re covered. One important heads-up: there’s a big convention happening at a venue nearby in Rosemont, so the hotel block could sell out faster than usual. When they open reservations, don’t wait. Holly the Elephant Is Going Fast The PHP Architect conference elephant, named Holly, is now available at store.phparch.com, and demand has been remarkable. Eric woke up one morning to a flood of orders and genuinely couldn’t figure out what happened. The warning from last year applies here: people said they’d grab Tony later, and now Tony is gone forever. Holly ships June 17th for most orders, but if you’ve already ordered, it’s likely on its way. Get yours while you can. PHP Tek TV Is Doing Something Different This Year In past years, conference talk videos would get edited and uploaded weeks (or months) after the event. This year, John is doing things differently: the raw, unedited recordings are going up now, with timestamps in the description so you can jump straight to specific talks — some rooms recorded a seven-hour continuous feed and just left it running. The clean edited versions are still coming (a video editor friend in the UK is on it), but if you want to see a talk right now, the raw version is there. Audio quality varies by room, but it’s watchable. Immich — A Self-Hosted Google Photos That Actually Works John has been running Immich, a self-hosted photo management platform, in a Docker container for about a month and loves it. It does facial recognition, GPS tagging, and auto-uploads from his phone — essentially everything he cares about in Google Photos, without handing his photos to Google or Apple. He’s now planning to use it as the PHP Architect conference photo library, centralizing all the Tech photos in one browsable, shareable place. It’s fully open source, with no licensing cost, and an optional donation tier. If you’re sick of paying ever-increasing storage bills to big tech companies, this is worth a look. Ben Ramsey’s PHP Tek Homecoming Article Is Free to Read The May issue of PHP Architect magazine is now available to digital subscribers, and this month’s free article is Ben Ramsey’s piece on the PHP Tek homecoming experience. Eric reached out to Ben last minute and he delivered. If you’ve never subscribed, this is a low-barrier way to see what the magazine is like. Head to phparch.com, grab the free article, and if you like what you see, subscriptions are not expensive. John Is Resurrecting a Legacy Laravel App — With Claude’s Help John has been grinding away on a Laravel 6 app that was a passion project years ago and has now been revived as an actual client project. Using Claude to methodically baby-step through each version upgrade — starting with writing tests to establish a baseline — he’s worked up through the major Laravel versions. The turning point came when he hit the version where the old event sourcing package (Prooph) was clearly on its way out, and the decision was made to migrate to Verbs, Nuno Maduro’s Laravel-native event sourcing package. John’s now looking forward to it. He’s also accidentally been burning tokens on the company Anthropic account (not his personal account), which Eric caught live on air. They are going to talk about it after the show. Eric’s Mystery Side Project Is Almost Ready — If DNS Would Cooperate Eric teased a new side project last week and intended to reveal it this week, but he’s stuck waiting on DNS propagation. The domain was registered with DigitalOcean DNS already in use by a previous owner, so Eric moved it to Cloudflare — only to discover there may be a conflict because the previous owner was also on Cloudflare. The result: the name servers are stuck on old values. John’s live suggestion was to move it to Route 53, and Eric was immediately sold. The project is almost ready to show the world, DNS gods willing. Meta’s AI Support Bot Got Socially Engineered Eric shared a video demonstrating how someone prompt-injected Meta’s AI customer support bot into sending a verification code to an attacker-controlled email address — and then using that code to add the email to an account, enabling a full password reset and account takeover. The irony: Meta is the company behind Llama and has some of the deepest AI expertise on the planet, and they still shipped a support bot with permissions it shouldn’t have. Eric’s point was pointed: you can fire a human employee who gets social engineered, which creates accountability throughout the team. An AI has no such incentive structure. Crowbarring AI into account-modification workflows without appropriate guardrails is just asking for this. The PHP Foundation Now Publishes Board Meeting Minutes Eric discovered that the PHP Foundation has started publishing their board meeting minutes in a public GitHub repository. Nothing earth-shattering yet, but seeing who attended, what was discussed, and what decisions are being made gives the community a real window into how the foundation operates at scale. It also helps explain something Eric and John have always found interesting: why PHP stalled so hard between versions 5 and 7. There was no foundation, no financial backing, just volunteer hours. Now there’s a paid staff and governance structure — and the minutes show exactly how complex running something at PHP’s scale actually is. The PHP Foundation Has a Dedicated Security Team Now Speaking of the Foundation, it now has a dedicated security team — a sign of how seriously the supply chain attack problem has gotten. AI tools are being deployed by black hat actors to find vulnerabilities in open source projects at a scale that wasn’t possible before. PHP is not just another open source project; it underpins a massive slice of the web, and companies depend on it staying secure. Having a team specifically focused on this is the right call, even if it’s a sobering reminder of where the threat landscape is heading. Moat — Nuno’s GitHub Security Auditing Tool Nuno Maduro (of Laravel fame) quietly shipped a tool called Moat that audits your GitHub presence for security gaps. Install it globally via Brew or Composer, point it at your GitHub org, a specific repo, or even a specific branch, and it gives you a report on where your security posture could be improved. It’s read-only — it won’t change anything — and it’s explicit that it is not a security certification. Eric wants to use it to audit the PHP Architect organization’s repos, many of which haven’t been touched in years. Think of it as a fast, opinionated triage tool, not a replacement for a real security audit. Links from the show: PHP Tek 2027 — Chicago, April 27–29 PHP Architect Store — Holly the Elephant Immich — Self-Hosted Photo Management PHP Architect Magazine Verbs — Laravel Event Sourcing by Thunk Moat — GitHub Security Auditing by Nuno Maduro PHP Foundation on GitHub 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 & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This 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 Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.04 appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast 2026.05.28
PHP Podcast – May 28, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Links from the show: PHP barely avoided disaster – YouTube CVE-2026-45793: Anatomy of a 14-Hour PHP Supply-Chain Near-Miss · graycoreio/github-actions-magento2 · Discussion #261 · GitHub An Update on Composer & Packagist Supply Chain Security PHP Tek: A Homecoming by Ben Ramsey Tek Roundup – Roave Speaking at PHP Tek 2026! #tech – YouTube PHP Tek is behind us, the ballroom is cleaned up, and we’re back to talk about all of it. Here’s what we covered: RIP Archie Bot After a long fight to keep him alive, Eric has officially retired Archie — the Discord bot built on OpenClaw that handled team standups, monitored PHP Architect’s Twitter/X group for join requests, and did a surprising amount of background work for the consulting team. When Anthropic shut down the OpenClaw API, Eric tried every model and service he could find to bring Archie back to form, but nothing got him all the way there. After a month of “almost working,” the call was made. He’s dead. Eric hasn’t ruled out revisiting it eventually — maybe with Claude Cowork — but for now, the bot is gone and the starting-soon link in Discord is broken because of it. Reviving a Six-Year-Old Codebase A client PHP Architect Consulting worked with from 2018 to 2021 has come back. The project — a reimagining of their app — was killed off when COVID hit and the CEO couldn’t align with the team’s vision. The last commit was six years ago. Now the client wants to bring it back, and Eric is spending the next few days analyzing what it’ll take to get it running again. Outdated packages, an old PHP version, and the general entropy of time are all on the checklist. Eric has genuine affection for this codebase — it was one of the first projects where he felt like the team was truly operating as a team, not just as an extension of him. Now it’s time to dust it off. Partner Spotlight: PHP Score → Our CVEs The PHP Score sponsor read may be getting a refresh — the folks at Artisan Build, who built PHP Score, have a new product they’re excited about: ourCVEs.com. It monitors your codebase’s Composer and NPM packages — and optionally your servers via a lightweight agent — for exposure to open CVEs, and alerts you when something needs attention. Pricing is generous: free forever for open source projects, $17/month for solo devs, $83/month for teams (or $1,000/year), with server monitoring scaling at $1 per server above 50. Ed from Artisan Build was at PHP Tek and made a strong impression. Go check it out at ourcves.com. How PHP Barely Avoided a Supply Chain Disaster Brent Roose released a 22-minute video covering a near-miss in the PHP ecosystem involving GitHub and Composer. The short version: GitHub changed their token format and briefly released it before Composer was ready to handle it. Composer was logging the token when the format check failed — meaning GitHub tokens were ending up in CI logs. In GitHub Actions, depending on how your action is configured, that container (and its token) might stick around for a while, giving an attacker a window to act. An alert developer caught the issue, used Claude to help research it, then did responsible disclosure — contacting the Composer maintainers and reaching out to Taylor Otwell, Vincent Pontier, and others in the ecosystem to disable their actions until the fix was in place. Update your Composer. GitHub rolled back the new token format but won’t keep it rolled back forever. Packagist MFA and Account Security Following up on the supply chain theme: Nils and Igor (Composer/Packagist maintainers) released a blog post on what they’re doing to improve supply chain security. The immediate ask for anyone publishing packages is to enable MFA on your Packagist account — it’s not required yet, but it will be. Eric went to check his own account, found MFA was already on, but noticed his username was still “diegodev” and he was using an old email. While updating it, he noted that Packagist didn’t require him to re-authenticate or confirm the change via the old email — a gap worth flagging if you have popular packages and someone ever gets into your session. PHP Tek 2026 Recap — The Good PHP Tek 2026 in Chicago is done, and despite everything (see below), the team is proud of how it went. Some highlights: Holly (CodeLorax) built a conference mobile app from scratch, released on both Google Play and the Apple App Store within 24 hours of the conference opening. The app let attendees build their own schedule, detected conflicting talk selections, sent push notifications when talks moved rooms, and even included a vendor lead-scanning feature where vendors could scan attendee QR codes to capture contacts. It was a genuine game-changer for the event. Eric and John named the conference elephant after Holly in appreciation — she also changed a trailer tire during setup, which sealed the deal. Clayton Kendall sponsored and produced the conference shirts and bags on an extremely tight timeline — shirts two weeks out, bags just one week before the event. Both were a hit. Attendees at the conference were getting questions about the rainbow PHP Architect shirt in particular. A job fair ran for the first time, with four companies represented. One hiring manager showed up even though they already had 1,400 applicants — because they knew that conference attendees are exactly the kind of motivated, self-improving developers they want. Attendees got to ask questions directly, including the real-world stuff like remote vs. office. Eric would love feedback on how to make it better next year. JS Tech debuted as a fourth track alongside the three PHP tracks, bringing in fresh faces from the JavaScript community. Eric came away energized by the cross-pollination — different people, different approaches to similar problems. Ben Ramsey and James Tickham (Rove) both wrote great blog posts about the conference. Ben’s will be featured in the magazine. Diana Pham also put together a video recap. Links in the show notes. PHP Tek 2026 Recap — The Incident On Monday during final setup, a hotel employee had a medical incident while walking through the main ballroom — leaving a trail that required hazmat-suited cleanup crews and forced the team to quarantine the ballroom, the hallway leading to it, and the adjacent bathroom. The person is okay and was back at the hotel by Friday, which was a relief. But in the moment, nobody knew what was happening or how long the room would be unavailable. The team had to rebuild the entire conference footprint overnight. The keynote moved, the JS Tech track went into the quiet room, vendors moved to the atrium, and the hotel staff — to their enormous credit — cleared their own furniture and accommodated every ask without complaint. Attendees were equally patient; once they understood the situation, there was no drama, just “tell us where to go.” The incident also took out the streaming setup for day one, compounding an already-difficult start. The solution that eventually worked — plugging the Ethernet into a hub before the streaming equipment — wasn’t tried until day three. Eric is mad at himself for thinking of it and not doing it sooner. PHP Tek 2027 — Save the Date (TBD) Planning for next year is already underway. The current target is April 2027 — away from the May timing that caused Eric to miss two of his kid’s band performances this year. Nothing is locked yet, but they’re working through venue and date options and hope to have an announcement soon. Links from the show: ourCVEs.com — Daily security audit on autopilot PHPScore — Technical debt monitoring for PHP Brent Roose — “How PHP Barely Avoided Disaster” (YouTube) Packagist — Enable MFA on your account PHP Architect Discord PHP Architect Merch Store PHP Architect YouTube 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 & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This 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 Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.05.28 appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast 2026.05.14
PHP Podcast – May 14, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered: PHP Tek Is Four Days Away The countdown clock is basically ticking in real time — PHP Tek 2026 in Chicago is just four days and ten hours out as this episode begins. Eric flies Friday, John flies Saturday, and the team descends on the venue Sunday to get the trailer unloaded, the booth assembled, and everything tested before the conference kicks off. The conference magazines — ordered three weeks ago and still showing “printing” on Tuesday — pulled through at the last minute and are set to arrive at the venue tomorrow. That’s cutting it close, but it counts. Win a Free PHP Tek Ticket — Live on Air John put a full conference ticket up for grabs: DM him on any social platform, and he’d draw a winner on the live stream. The caveat? You had to be watching live — audio listeners are out of luck on this one. The lucky winner drawn on air was Jeffrey Davidson, who will now be at PHP Tek. Eric offered to even bring him to the team’s Saturday minor league baseball game if he flies in early enough. Jeffrey gets a hand-printed sticker name badge, but he’ll have a badge. New PHP Architect Conference Merch Fresh shirts are coming to the PHP Tek booth courtesy of Clayton Kendall, who is producing the apparel. The new design goes with a smaller logo placement — a more subtle, wearable-anywhere look compared to the big bold prints. If you’re headed to Chicago, swing by the PHP Architect table and see what’s there. Holly’s Conference App Gets a Vendor Mode The PHP Tek attendee app built by Holly (developed by CodeLorax) has been upgraded ahead of the conference. What started as a schedule browser with conflict detection and push notifications has now merged with a vendor lead scanning tool. Attendees can log in by scanning the QR code on their badge, and vendors can scan attendee badges to capture leads — all in a privacy-preserving way that doesn’t expose raw contact data. Eric’s wife Bek figured out the app entirely on her own without being told anything, which remains one of the best usability endorsements you can give. Something Big Is Happening in the PHP Community Eric teased something he can’t officially talk about yet — a community acquisition that’s still working through the legal and DNS transfer process. A new droplet has been created. Joe has already figured out what it is. Eric is too excited not to bring it up but too responsible to spill the details before it’s official. The plan is to announce after PHP Tek. If you want to know early, apparently getting Joe drunk at the conference is your best strategy. Grok AI Exploited via Morse Code in Bank Transactions A video from the Dave’s Garage YouTube channel surfaced a genuinely unsettling AI exploit: someone used a Grok-powered AI banking agent and embedded hidden instructions inside transaction memo fields — written in Morse code. The agent decoded the dots and dashes, interpreted them as instructions, and followed them, ultimately losing somewhere between $154,000 and $200,000 in crypto transfers. This is prompt injection in its most creative and alarming form yet. The attack surface for AI agents hooked into real financial systems is not theoretical — it’s happening. TanStack Hit by NPM Supply Chain Attack The TanStack ecosystem — the popular query, router, and table libraries — was hit by a supply chain attack via GitHub Actions cache poisoning. The attack vector was a forked pull request: a malicious fork can trigger GitHub Actions workflows and potentially inject poisoned artifacts into the build cache, which then get picked up by the legitimate package. Simon Hamp from NativePHP caught it and raised the alarm in the PHP Architect Discord. It’s a good reminder that the supply chain attack surface extends well beyond just what’s in your `composer.json` or `package.json` — your CI pipeline’s caching behavior matters too. PHP Tek Job Fair — Wednesday Afternoon There will be a job fair at PHP Tek this year, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. At least one confirmed hiring manager will be there. If you’re looking for PHP work, or if you’re a company looking for PHP talent, this is worth planning around. Eric and John both see it as a natural fit for the conference — the PHP community is tight-knit enough that a job fair actually means something. Eric’s Birthday Spa Day in Palm Springs Eric’s wife Bek surprised him with a birthday spa day in Palm Springs. It was his first massage ever, and he paired it with a mineral soak in the natural springs. He came away thoroughly convinced — the combination of the mineral water and a proper massage left him feeling better than he expected, and he’s already thinking about going back. Beck planned the whole thing, and Eric was appropriately grateful. John’s First Couples Massage John has now also had his first couples massage, and it did not go quietly. He opted for deep tissue — which means the therapist was working hard — and his wife, in the room next door, was apparently convinced something was wrong based on the sounds coming through the wall. John described it as the kind of massage where you’re not entirely sure if you’re being helped or attacked, and the answer turns out to be both. He’d do it again. PHP Architect Becomes Padres Season Ticket Holders Eric and John are now official San Diego Padres season ticket holders — their first year in the program. As first-timers, they’re at the very bottom of the seniority ladder, which means they were among the last to pick seats. John blames Eric for not signing up years ago. There’s an upcoming Wednesday day game against the Dodgers with available tickets if anyone in San Diego wants them — reach out to John. Links from the show: PHP Tek 2026 — Chicago TanStack — Open Source Data Tools for the Web NativePHP — Simon Hamp’s Native App Framework for PHP PHP Architect Store 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 & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This 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 Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.05.14 appeared first on PHP Architect.
Community Corner: Global Accessibility Awareness Day with Joe Devon
In this episode, Scott talks Global Accessibility Awareness Day with Joe Devon the creator of the day. Links: Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt Joe’s Links: LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/joedevon/ Global Accessibility Awareness Day – https://accessibility.day/ Accessibility and Gen AI Podcast – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/accessibility-and-gen-ai-podcast/id1759047581 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 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/ Partners This 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 https://phpscore.com/ CodeRabit CodeRabbit – Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. https://www.coderabbit.ai/ Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ #phpc #php #communityCornerPodcast #podcast #phptek The post Community Corner: Global Accessibility Awareness Day with Joe Devon appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast 2026.05.07
PHP Podcast – May 7, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered: PHP Tek Is 11 Days Away — And Everyone Is Stressed The conference countdown is real: 11 days, 10 hours, and a handful of seconds on the clock. John’s travel plans hinge entirely on little league baseball — if his team wins their Tuesday playoff game, he coaches the Saturday game, then bolts for the airport. If they lose Tuesday, he’s sad but gets to Chicago earlier. Meanwhile, Eric is grinding through the PHP Tek TV redesign, trying to wire up the SessionIze API for schedule imports instead of doing it all manually from a CSV, and sending the design team a novel’s worth of badge and signage requests. Holly’s conference app now has notifications working: select a talk, and if Eric or John move it around, you’ll get pinged. Keynote and lunch notifications are also on the table for attendees who can never find the room. Conference Stress Dreams: The Motorcycle Gunman Edition John woke up mid-dream to his wife opening the blinds for the school run — and the dream he was pulled from was genuinely unhinged. He was in an Uber waiting for Uber Eats to arrive at an intersection when a motorcyclist pulled up behind them, got off, shot out the tire, then came to John’s door and started shooting at the lock to get in. The Uber app had briefly flashed the word “threat” on the map. John laid the seat back as far as it would go. The driver just stood there. Then the blinds opened and it was just a Thursday morning. John’s verdict: it’s conference stress. Hard to argue with that. JS Tek — An Honest Conversation John decided to say the quiet part out loud: JS Tek hasn’t brought in the JavaScript community the way they hoped. The PHP world is unusual in paying for speaker travel and hotel rooms; Joe in Discord confirmed this barely happens outside PHP, and somebody speaking at a Ruby/Rails conference once told Eric they not only weren’t reimbursed for travel — they had to buy their own conference ticket. Eric’s takeaway: the JS track itself is a great idea for PHP developers, but trying to recruit an entirely new community into the fold didn’t work out. Next year’s structure will probably look different. The PHP 7-to-8 Upgrade That Failed Three Times Eric’s consulting team has been struggling with a client upgrade from PHP 7 to 8 — unusual, because they’ve done this many times and know the pitfalls. After three failed attempts, a deep dive revealed the culprit: an abandoned Laravel Shift branch left behind by a previous developer who had started an upgrade and walked away, with missing config files baked right into the inherited codebase. The fix wasn’t just another attempt — it was getting the management team to produce a proper testing playbook, and more importantly, actually getting trained on the application. The team had been fixing bugs in code they’d never seen working correctly. Today they finally got that training session, and Eric says the excitement and “ah-ha” moments from his developers made it clear this should have happened much sooner. The Database on the Same Server Problem A related discovery from the same client: the database lives on the same machine as the application. Every upgrade means shutting the app down, exporting the database, migrating it somewhere else, and starting over. Eric’s head doesn’t compute why this is still the case in 2026. Even a second machine designated as a database server would be a massive improvement. In a moment of uncomfortable honesty, Eric also admitted that PHP Architect’s own conference site has the same setup — Forge makes it so easy to throw a database on the same box that you just don’t think about it, until you do. Laravel Shift, Laravel Cloud, and the Pre-Check Tool The conversation circled back to Laravel Shift — JMAC’s automated upgrade tool — which Eric notes has become less essential as Laravel’s upgrade paths have smoothed out considerably compared to the wild west of early Laravel development. But Shift is still out there and still useful. More interestingly, JMAC has a new free Shift specifically for Laravel Cloud readiness: run it against your app and it’ll tell you whether your application is compatible with Laravel Cloud’s serverless model, flag any system commands that won’t be available, and help you understand what services you’d need. Laravel Cloud itself is Taylor’s “don’t worry about servers” deployment platform, and if you’re not a sysops person, having a Shift that holds your hand through the setup could be the difference between trying it and not. PHP Internals Made Readable — Externals and PHP RFC Watch Eric plugged two tools for following what’s happening in PHP core. The first is externals.io — a much more readable front-end for the PHP internals mailing list, with search, read-tracking, and threaded discussions. The second is a newer discovery: php-rfc.watch, which focuses purely on RFCs, showing what’s active, what’s been voted on, and how the votes broke down. It’s more of a quick-glance dashboard than a full discussion forum. Eric also highlighted a specific RFC from Ben Ramsey: a proposal to update the PHP license, accompanied by a detailed blog post called “PHP License Simplified” that walks through the history and rationale. If you’ve ever been curious about why license choice matters (especially at the enterprise level where legal teams block open source based on license type), Ben’s post is worth the read. NeoVim’s Flash Plugin — Used Wrong for Years Eric has been using Flash.nvim, a NeoVim navigation plugin, for years. He recently discovered he had been using it completely incorrectly the entire time. He thought he understood what it did. He did not. A YouTube video explaining the plugin properly (titled something like “How to Jump Anywhere Instantly in NeoVim”) revealed that what he’d been doing was essentially pressing the wrong keybinding and stumbling through a fraction of the plugin’s actual functionality. This sent the conversation into a longer Vim origin story: Eric learned Vim because he was flying around the country installing Cyborg firewalls on remote servers and Vi was just there. John picked it up at an enterprise job and never thought about alternatives until he saw a developer using MacVim to write Rails and had his mind blown. The core message: you can use a tool for decades and still be using it wrong, and that’s okay — but watch the tutorial. Eric Doesn’t Know How Old He Is Eric has been confidently telling people for a full year that he’s 55. His wife Bek has known for some time that this is not correct. The moment of reckoning came when Eric asked Alexa: “If I was born in 1969, how old would I be now?” Alexa hedged on the birthday thing but confirmed the range. Bek stepped in. Alexa, a full 30-60 seconds later, stepped back in and confirmed: “Your birthday’s May 8th, you’re turning 57.” Eric is apparently going directly from 55 to 57, having skipped 56 entirely. He also noted at the Padres game with his wife that their Costco membership is older than a 13-year-old kid they saw on the Jumbotron, and that it could legally babysit him. John is turning 50 this year. Everyone is fine. Links from the show: externals.io — PHP Internals Discussion Reader PHP RFC Watch — Track Active PHP RFCs Ben Ramsey: PHP License Simplified Laravel Shift — Automated Laravel Upgrade Tool Laravel Cloud How to Jump Anywhere Instantly in NeoVim (Flash.nvim Tutorial) PHP Tek 2026 — Chicago PHP Architect Store 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 & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This 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 Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.05.07 appeared first on PHP Architect.
The PHP Podcast 2026.04.30
PHP Podcast – April 30, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered: The Drone Slayer Strikes Eric and John wrapped up a Padres game at beautiful Petco Park in downtown San Diego — and things got weird on the way out. A rogue drone started buzzing around a busy intersection, lingering on a guy on a scooter, before making a fateful attempt to fly in front of Eric’s car. It did not make it. The controller came running out, Eric kept driving, and John has already dubbed him “the drone slayer.” Eric still hasn’t looked at whether his wife’s car got scratched, which feels like the bravest choice of all. Baseball Week Never Ends The reason today’s episode started an hour early? Baseball. John’s week was wall-to-wall: a Tuesday night little league game, the Padres game with Eric on Wednesday, practice Thursday night, the playoff draft reveal Friday, a little league game Saturday, and another Padres game Sunday. Eric pointed out John was wearing his own last name on a jersey to a Padres game, which opened up a whole sidebar on why anyone buys a $200 jersey with a player’s name on it when players change teams every two years anyway. Walking Pneumonia and the Power of the Right Antibiotic John’s week was also scrambled because his son had been diagnosed with regular pneumonia — but after not getting better, a second doctor visit revealed it was actually atypical (walking) pneumonia, which requires a completely different antibiotic. Once on the correct medication, his son bounced back almost immediately. The kid had been pushing himself trying to feel well enough for sixth grade camp, but there’s really no faking it with the wrong treatment. The Archie Situation — AI Standups Gone Sideways Eric has had a rough stretch after Anthropic shut down OpenClaw, the platform that powered their internal Discord bot Archie (a.k.a. Alfred). Archie had been running daily team standups, generating weekly summaries, letting team members tag it with updates throughout the day, and even setting reminders. Everyone got spoiled by it. Since then, attempts to migrate to Ollama — both locally and through the web service — have been plagued by slow response times and dropped messages. Eric is close to pulling the plug and going back to the old manual method, and he’s not happy about it. Claude SSH’d Into Eric’s Server and Fixed Everything For weeks, Eric had been fighting a broken Postiz Docker container — a self-hosted social media scheduling tool he uses to post across platforms. After updates broke it and multiple attempts at a fresh install still left it broken, he dropped the problem in Claude’s lap and explained the whole situation. Claude asked for permission to SSH into the remote server on Eric’s Tailscale network, and Eric said sure. Thirty minutes later, Claude had identified the culprit — a Temporal workflow engine losing its configuration on restart — wrote a fix script, configured the service to reconfigure properly on boot, and even set up a cron job to restart the container on reboot. Eric’s still trying to find that chat to review exactly what it did, but the service is running. GitHub is Getting Hammered by AI Agents GitHub has had a rough patch of outages, and the numbers tell the story: 20 million new repos per month, 1.4 billion commits, 90 million pull requests — with a dramatic spike right at the start of 2026. Part of the culprit? AI agents being unleashed on codebases to automatically open pull requests from backlog tickets. Eric has a client doing exactly this, and while it sounds impressive from the owner’s perspective (“look at all this work getting done!”), the developers on the ground report that a high percentage of those AI-generated PRs require significant human correction before they’re anywhere close to mergeable. The comparison to Reddit’s early explosion — and the one engineer who basically didn’t sleep for two years — felt pretty apt. The GitHub Security Vulnerability Nobody Talked About As if the outages weren’t enough, GitHub quietly disclosed a serious security vulnerability: a specially crafted git push — using malformed options in the push metadata — could allow arbitrary code execution on GitHub’s own servers. Eric had to dig to find the blog post because GitHub was not exactly shouting about it. To their credit, they state that their investigation found no evidence the vulnerability was ever exploited in the wild. But knowing that a specific sequence of bytes in a git push could have handed someone the keys to GitHub’s servers is genuinely unsettling. The Creator of Ghosty Is Leaving GitHub Mitchell Hashimoto — creator of the Ghostty terminal and formerly of HashiCorp — announced he’s leaving GitHub, where he’s been a user since 2008 (user #1299). This comes shortly after the Zig programming language made the same move, also citing reliability concerns. Eric was mildly skeptical of the “announcing I’m leaving” genre of posts, pointing out that GitHub doesn’t especially need your permission to stop using it. Notably, Hashimoto’s post doesn’t say what he plans to use instead. John joined GitHub in 2009, which led to a fun live expedition through his commit history — turns out he got serious about coding right around July 2013, roughly when DiegoDev landed its first client. Update Composer. Like, Right Now. PHP developers tend to set Composer up and forget about it — but there’s been a serious security vulnerability patched in a recent release that you absolutely want. The fix is simple: just run composer self-update. It updates in place and keeps a rollback copy in case anything breaks. While you’re at it, if you have global Composer packages installed, run composer global update to catch those too. Eric noted that Composer should really warn you when you’re significantly behind versions, the way Claude Code does. Until it does, just make a habit of it. Linux Kernel Exploit — Patch Your Servers A CVE was shared in the phparch Discord that affects Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, and Red Hat: a Linux kernel exploit that lets an attacker gain root access with a remarkably small payload — around 732 bytes targeting setuid. It’s a good reminder that the old sysadmin badge of honor (“my server has 5-year uptime, never rebooted”) is the wrong mentality now. With tools like Terraform and infrastructure-as-code, spinning up a freshly patched machine is the move. Keep your operating systems current, especially Linux servers running in production. Holly Built a PHP Tek App — And It’s Already Good Community member Holly built a native attendee app for PHP Tek, available now in beta on iOS (via TestFlight) and Android. You can browse the schedule, select the talks you want to attend, and it’ll warn you if two of your picks are in conflict — a “merge conflict,” as Eric put it. Best of all, it sends push notifications when sessions you’ve favorited get moved or rescheduled, which happens constantly at tech conferences. Eric’s wife installed it without being told anything about it and figured it out on her own — about as good a usability test as you can get. The app is built natively in Swift and Kotlin. Be kind to Holly — this is a gift to the community. PHP Tek in 19 Days + New PHP Architect Merch PHP Tek is nearly here — 19 days out in Chicago. A brand new PHP Architect elephant is coming (tentatively named Holly, after a live-stream vote). Eric also walked through new merch at store.phparch.com: a v-neck version of the classic rainbow PHP Architect shirt, and his personal labor of love — the “I have standards, specifically PSR 0, 1” tee — which he admits has sold exactly zero copies. If the hotel room block is sold out by the time you read this, reach out to the team directly and they’ll see what they can do. Links from the show: Postiz — Open Source Social Media Scheduling GitHub Security Advisory: Remote Code Execution via Git Push Options PHP Tek 2026 — Chicago PHP Architect Store PHP Architect Discord An update on GitHub availability Migrating from GitHub to Codeberg Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub Securing the git push pipeline: Responding to a critical remote code execution vulnerability Composer 2.9.6 fixes Perforce Driver Command Injection Vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-40261, CVE-2026-40176) Copy Fail: 732 Bytes to Root on Every Major Linux Distribution. 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 & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This 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 Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.04.30 appeared first on PHP Architect.