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July 22Community 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/
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The post Community Corner Podcast: Firefly III with James Cole appeared first on PHP Architect.
17 min
July 17The 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
Mastodon: @[email protected]
PHPArch.me: @svpernova09
Sara Golemon
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Holly Schilling
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Streams:
Youtube Channel
Twitch
Connect & Hire
PHP Architect Website
Twitter/X
Mastodon
Hire PHP Developers
Looking to hire PHP developers? Email [email protected] – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.
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The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.16 appeared first on PHP Architect.
1 hr 21 min
July 10The 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: @[email protected]
Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social
PHPArch.me: @eric
John Congdon
X: @johncongdon
Mastodon: @[email protected]
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 [email protected] – 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.
1 hr
July 03The 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: @[email protected]
Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social
PHPArch.me: @eric
John Congdon
X: @johncongdon
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social
PHPArch.me: @john
Streams:
Youtube Channel
Twitch
Connect & Hire
PHP Architect Website
Twitter/X
Mastodon
Hire PHP Developers
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The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.02 appeared first on PHP Architect.
1 hr 13 min
June 26The 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: @[email protected]
Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social
PHPArch.me: @eric
John Congdon
X: @johncongdon
Mastodon: @[email protected]
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 [email protected] – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.
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Infrastructure Management, Simplified
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PHPScore
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Music Provided by Epidemic Sound
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Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com
The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.25 appeared first on PHP Architect.
53 min
June 24Community 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/
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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.
28 min
June 18The 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 [email protected] – 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.
1 hr 20 min
June 11The 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 [email protected] – 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.
1 hr 18 min
June 05The 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: @[email protected]
Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social
PHPArch.me: @eric
John Congdon
X: @johncongdon
Mastodon: @[email protected]
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 [email protected] – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.
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The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.04 appeared first on PHP Architect.
58 min
May 30The 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: @[email protected]
Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social
PHPArch.me: @eric
John Congdon
X: @johncongdon
Mastodon: @[email protected]
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 [email protected] – 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.
1 hr 12 min