php[podcast] episodes from php[architect]

By php[podcast] episodes from php[architect]Technology

php[podcast] episodes from php[architect] episodes

August 05Community Corner: JSCPD with Andrey Kucherenko


In this episode, Scott talks with Andrey Kucherenko, creator of jscpd, about why copy-pasted code is an anti-pattern, how jscpd detects duplicate code across dozens of languages, and how the tool has evolved to work inside agentic coding workflows.
Links:
Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx
Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt
Andrey’s Links:
jscpd – https://jscpd.dev/
Scott’s Links:
Website – https://scott.keck-warren.com/
Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/scottkeckwarren.bsky.social
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-keck-warren-91689810/
Mastodon – https://phpc.social/@scottkeckwarren
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 #jscpd
The post Community Corner: JSCPD with Andrey Kucherenko appeared first on PHP Architect.
19 min
August 04PHP Alive and Kicking 2026.08.04
 
 
PHP Alive and Kicking – August 4, 2026
Hosts: Chris Miller (standing in solo while Mike is on holiday)
Mike escaped to a beach so Chris hosts alone with special guest Derick Rethans. Expect date-time philosophy, PHP 8.6 goodies, Xdebug secrets, deprecation drama, and a heated debate about how to queue at a pub.
From University Websites to Committing to PHP
Derick traces his PHP origins back to his university days, building websites that needed database connectivity. ASP.NET was an option, but nobody wanted to pay for it — Linux was cool, and PHP was easy to start using. That combination hooked him early.
His very first accepted contribution came from a practical need: everyone wanted centered Shockwave Flash films on their pages, back before CSS even existed. Centering meant knowing the width of a file, and while getimagesize() already existed (and still works today), it didn’t understand Flash. Derick added that support.
From there he fell into bug triage, spending several years working through the issue tracker alongside Jani Taskinen (whose “Sniper” name still shows up in commit logs). For a long time it was just the two of them reproducing and fixing bugs — an important task that gets neglected easily, which is exactly how backlogs of a thousand issues and pull requests build up.
The Eternal Problem of Date and Time
Chris and Derick dig into why date-time bugs are so hard to triage: date algorithms are genuinely complicated, and it takes real time to figure out whether a report is a user’s mistake or an actual PHP bug. Crashes are easy to reproduce; subtle date arithmetic is not.
The core philosophical question is “what does adding a month even mean?” If it’s January 31st and you add a month, PHP historically just bumps the month number, producing February 31st, which overflows to March 2nd or 3rd. But most people who add a month really just want the next month and don’t care about day counts — so “next month” is conceptually distinct from “add a month.” Derick has been brainstorming better interfaces so people can’t make these mistakes, though it’s a lot of work.
They touch on Carbon as a unified interface people understand, but agree that making Carbon the language standard isn’t the right move. At the language level you need something that works for everybody and ideally doesn’t break existing code.
What’s Coming in PHP 8.6
The first new time class is landing: a Duration object representing seconds and nanoseconds within a specific range, living in the Time namespace. It’s a trial run for new APIs and immediately useful — for example, passing a duration to sleep or to timeouts in the new polling API, rather than juggling raw integers.
Another highlight is partial function application. With the pipe operator from 8.5, piping into anything that takes more than one argument meant wrapping it in a closure (and extra parentheses because of how the parser works). Partials let you pre-fill some arguments so the resulting callable accepts just one — perfect for pipelines.
There’s also TLS session resumption support for streams, which lets OpenSSL shortcut the expensive session setup on repeated TLS connections. Bigger stream-layer work by Jakub Zelenka of the PHP Foundation is underway too, but that’s a huge job on old code and won’t make 8.6 — Chris and Derick both note the pain of keeping a year-and-a-half-long project in sync with the master branch.
Xdebug in 8.6 and the Xdebug Cloud
Xdebug’s recent headline feature (shipped with 8.5) is native path mapping, which lets you configure remote-to-local path mappings inside Xdebug itself instead of your IDE — handy when your code runs in Docker or on a dev machine. Feedback since release is driving quality-of-life improvements. For 8.6, relatively little is broken, though a change to how PHP reports line numbers needs untangling so debugging stops on the correct lines.
Derick also has a new code-coverage implementation that gives better, more correct results at roughly a 10% speed cost. He’d rather ship correct output than fast output — and points out that PHPCov may be quicker but skips path and branch coverage entirely. The pair discuss how branch coverage doubles your test count at every branching point, and how Xdebug has a hard limit (around 64K) to avoid running out of memory on pathological code.
Finally, Chris asks about Xdebug Cloud — a paid service that enables debugging where networking otherwise wouldn’t, such as remote teams sharing a single development machine (an SSH tunnel only lets one person listen on the debug port). It’s £15/month or £150/year for an individual, priced similarly to Packagist’s private packages, and helps fund Derick’s ongoing Xdebug work. He plans to do more marketing about it this year.
Deprecations, Consensus, and Two-Thirds Votes
Every year PHP collects a big list of deprecations — around 20 to 25 this cycle — voted on separately. Derick is more reluctant than most to approve them, arguing many offer no clear user benefit. His examples: deprecating metaphone() (whose suggested Composer replacement ironically relies on the internal function) and the dechunk filter (which can’t really be removed because HTTP streams use it internally).
The list() deprecation is another sore point — Chris uses it, and the vote is tied 21–21 with one abstention, so it won’t pass under the two-thirds rule. Derick reminds everyone that “yes” needs to be twice “no.” Returning from a finally block is another candidate that makes little sense to use but hurts nothing to keep.
Chris and Derick reflect on how voting was originally meant to confirm consensus reached on the mailing list, not to be the decision itself. A 50%+1 result isn’t consensus; two-thirds is the compromise, even if true 75–80% agreement would be ideal. Joe notes many deprecations are groundwork to reserve keywords for future RFCs — which raises the perennial question of how you measure real-world usage across Composer’s dependency chains.
Infrastructure, the Website, and the Next Generation
The PHP infrastructure has been converted to an Ansible-based repository over the last year and a half (largely by Derick, with help from Joe), replacing a wild mix of individually maintained servers — one was still running FreeBSD 4.3. They’ve also migrated to a new CDN, which brought surprises: a default one-month cache, ignoring the query string in cache keys, and even dark/light mode being an organization-wide setting rather than per-user.
On the website side, everything currently lives in a single root directory of 1999-vintage code, and there’s a long-pending patch to restructure it. The PHP Foundation’s ambassadors program — with speaking, marketing, and research streams — aims to make the very techy php.net homepage speak to CTOs and newcomers about who uses PHP and why it’s a thriving project (only 31-ish years old, versus C’s 60).
The conversation closes on caretakers and the next generation of contributors. Triage, they stress, doesn’t require deep internals knowledge — just reading reports to see if they still make sense is hugely valuable. Security and infrastructure access necessarily stay gatekept for trust reasons, and both agree a bus factor of one (or even two) isn’t good enough. Chris admits he’s struggling to name people who are both nice and know infra.
Links from the show:
Join us live in Discord — discord.phparch.com
Watch live on YouTube — youtube.com/phparch
PHP Tek Conference 2027 — Call for Papers now open
PHP Arch Swag Store — store.phparch.com
Xdebug — and Xdebug Cloud for shared debugging
Magazine discount code ALIVE3 — three free months on an annual digital subscription
Host:
Chris Miller
X: @ccmiller2018
Mastodon: @[email protected]
Bluesky: @ccmiller2018.bsky.social
PHPArch.me: @miller
Mike Page
Mastodon: @[email protected]
PHPArch.me: @mikepagedev
Streams:
Youtube Channel
Twitch
Connect & Hire
PHP Architect Website
Twitter/X
Mastodon
Hire PHP Developers
Looking to hire PHP developers? Email [email protected] – the team is 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 PHP Alive and Kicking 2026.08.04 appeared first on PHP Architect.
47 min
July 30The PHP Podcast 2026.07.30
 
 
The PHP Podcast – July 30, 2026
Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling
Time travel is real, birds aren’t. The gang argues about Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, boiling rocks, and stones (the weight kind), then gets into PSR-3 logging, the PHP ecosystem, AI slop bug reports, Codeberg’s anti-AI stance, and Laravel Cloud’s scale-to-zero magic.
Fahrenheit, Boiling Rocks, and Byte-Ordering Dates
The show opened with Joe admitting he jumbles her hours, minutes, and seconds — and getting mocked by Europeans for a cache-control header PR on the PHP website. That kicked off a tangent about how the American month-day-year ordering is, as Sara put it, “middle-endian” nonsense that makes no sense as a byte ordering.
From there the crew tumbled down a rabbit hole of measurement units. Joe planted his flag on Fahrenheit as the human-centered temperature scale, while Sara argued that if you stop being “speciesist” about it, water-based Celsius wins. The debate somehow escalated into whether rocks boil, with Google eventually schooling everyone that molten rock vaporizes north of 3,000°C (5,400°F), and a callback to British “stones” as boomer energy nobody younger than half a century actually uses.
Proper Logging with PSR-3
Joe walked through Marco Pivetta’s blog post on proper logging with PSR-3, praising it as a great write-up on injecting loggers via dependency injection and the “some logs are better than no logs” philosophy. A common trap Marco calls out: apps stuffed with beautifully descriptive info-level logs that nobody ever sees because production never runs in info mode.
The big selling point of sticking to a PSR-3-compatible interface is minimal dependencies — instead of pulling in three or four packages and wiring up a pile of configuration, the upstream decisions are already made for you. Holly pushed back on the ergonomics of `$this->logger->error()` feeling heavy for every log call, which spun off a delightfully unhinged RFC pitch: built-in emoji functions where the emoji logs an error and logs a panic.
The Ecosystem Is Why People Stay
The hosts pushed back on the recurring “PHP needs feature X because language Y has it” argument. Sara’s take: if another language is genuinely the better tool, nothing stops you from using it — and revamping PHP’s onboarding process is a far better way to attract newcomers than chasing features would-be developers may never even use.
Holly cut to what everyone had glossed over: the ecosystem. You can write Swift on the server with Vapor, but you won’t have the libraries. Whatever you need in PHP, it already exists. A listener even pointed Joe at Brent Roose’s Tempest framework mid-stream to solve a code-highlighting problem on his blog. That gravitational pull of “whatever you need, it’s here” is what keeps people in the PHP orbit.
AI, Layoffs, and Graybeards
Sparked by Gemma’s blog post “Infrastructure and Other Paradoxes” — where an LLM cheerfully suggested folding four brand-new tools (Terraform, Nix, NixOS, Guix) into a team that’s expert in none of them — the crew dug into where AI helps and where it hurts. The consensus: AI is a force multiplier for research and analysis, but it can’t replace the human judgment of knowing what *not* to ship.
Joe brought up an Inc.com article claiming 55% of leadership now regret their major layoffs, with companies like Ford rehiring graybeards because nobody left knew how the software worked. Holly noted this cycle isn’t new, just operating at a terrifying new scale, and Sara emphasized that AI accelerates shipping crap just as easily as it accelerates shipping good work — you still have to fundamentally understand the changes you’re applying.
Codeberg’s Anti-AI Stance & the Slop Bug Report Problem
Holly introduced Codeberg — the nonprofit, community-led GitHub alternative built on Forgejo — and its new policy banning AI/vibe-coded contributions, including a clause flagging work disproportionate to a project’s contributor count. The hosts respected the position but worried it might spell the end of Codeberg, since experienced open-source folks lean on AI tooling (like partner CodeRabbit and traditional static analyzers) as force multipliers.
That led into Sara’s frustration with AI-generated security slop. Daniel Stenberg shut down Curl’s bug bounty program over reports where someone’s own test program deliberately creates RCEs and blames Curl. The fix, Sara argued, is a one-paragraph “elevator pitch” summary — and a plea to maintainers to mark every slop report as spam so GitHub eventually bans the account. The group riffed on adversarial AI (two Claude contexts checking each other, like Apple Intelligence verifying sports-game summaries) as a defensive triage layer, while acknowledging people are simply too dumb to run “double-check this before submitting.”
Laracon: Laravel Cloud Scale-to-Zero
Eric was off at Laracon, which meant peak morale at PHP Architect. The coolest announcement, in Joe’s view, was Laravel Cloud’s scale-to-zero: your entire stack — app server, Valkey, and MySQL — can scale down to nothing when idle and spin back up in under 500 milliseconds on the next request. That’s a potential game-changer for side projects with bursty, uneven traffic and no DevOps army.
Holly and Sara were skeptical about how you cold-start a MySQL instance that fast — almost certainly a pause/resume rather than a true cold start. Other Laracon news: a Laravel language server protocol for better autocomplete and code navigation, plus managed queues that also scale to zero and only wake when a job needs firing.
Links from the show:
PHP Tek 2027 — Chicago, April 27–29, CFP open through end of August
Join us live in Discord
PHP Arch Swag Store
Proper logging in PHP with PSR-3
Codeberg — Software development, but free
Tempest by Brent Roose
infraslopture and other paradoxes
companies regret laying off humans for AI
Hosts:
Joe Ferguson
Mastodon: @[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] – the team is available for consulting, infrastructure work, 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 2026.07.30 appeared first on PHP Architect.
1 hr 2 min
July 23The 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: @[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.
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.
1 hr 9 min
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/
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.
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.
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.
1 hr 12 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
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
Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com
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.
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.
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/
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.
28 min