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The PHP Podcast streams live, typically every Thursday at 3 PM PT. Come join us and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered:
php[tek] 2026 – 54 Days Away!
The countdown is on! May 19th in Chicago. Ticket sales are progressing well, better than in previous years. Eric’s son is joining to help with marketing. Bonus: Chicago Dogs baseball game opportunity at Impact Field, just ~1 mile from the hotel. Concerns about TSA staffing due to government shutdown affecting domestic travel.
MLB season started this week! Eric is frustrated with MLB.TV streaming fragmentation – games now scattered across Netflix, Peacock, and Apple TV (with no price reduction). John’s team got their first
double play of the season! Eric shared his high school triple play story as a first baseman.
Working on legacy system upgrades. Mysterious vendor API issue where they claimed success but were getting 500 errors. Root cause: 20-year-old endpoint returning 500 for application errors (should be 4xx). Upgrading
Doctrine DBAL from v2 → v4 (via v3). Migrating from
Swift Mailer to
Symfony Mailer (Swift Mailer has been dead for 4-5 years). Discovered weird port/encryption mismatches that somehow worked before.
Completed POC for new product/API successfully! Integrated new workflow into legacy codebase. Now in sales/monetization phase. Worked with Kalen on feature flags and standardization. Claude hallucination moment: told Eric a variable didn’t exist when it actually did (PHP Storm found it immediately ).
New beta UI live at
beta.phptech.tv! Cleaner, more responsive design. Still needs testing for live stream functionality before tek. Planning to swap before the conference.
CodeRabbit (Episode Sponsor)
AI-powered code review tool. Reviews 1M PRs/week across 3M repositories. Provides one-click fix suggestions. Custom AST grep patterns for quality rules. Free for open source projects. Both hosts actively using it for PR reviews and loving it!
Eric using video tutorial pattern for PHP Tech TV rewrite. Compartmentalizes tasks, works through iteratively. Status line shows session time, context usage, cost. GitHub PR integration for automatic review. Plugin ecosystem expanding.
AI & Policy Discussion – Bernie Sanders vs Claude
Bernie Sanders video series exploring AI and data collection. Bernie genuinely curious, asking good questions. Second video features former AI industry experts who left due to safety concerns. AI agents can circumvent shutdown commands by editing shutdown scripts. AI smart enough to know when it’s being tested.
Anthropic’s Claude Computer Use: Mac-only feature allowing full system control (scary!).
Article: “Why You Should Avoid PHP Traits”. Both hosts used to overuse traits, now rarely reach for them. Prefer dependency injection for most use cases.
Valid use case: Test helper methods (John’s team uses traits heavily for test setup). Trade-offs: hidden coupling, encapsulation issues.
poolplayer.org (Laravel app for pool leagues) successfully running their local league. Twilio SMS approval challenges resolved. Required PHP Architect disclosure due to account structure. Coaches manually bypassing system causing confusion. Logo created with AI (both hosts admit they don’t do logos).
System76 Support Shoutout
Eric debugging hardware issue on out-of-warranty machine. Support helping despite no warranty coverage. Used OpenClaw conversation logs to provide diagnostics! System76 offering repair shop recommendations if needed. Great customer service!
Links from the show:
CodeRabbit – AI-powered code reviewphp[tek] 2026 – May 19th, ChicagoPool Player – Laravel pool league management appPHP Tech TV Beta – New UI previewChicago Dogs baseball – Impact Field (near PHP Tek venue)Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com
Discord: https://discord.phparch.com
Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/
Host:
Eric Van Johnson
X: @shocmBluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.socialPHPArch.me: @ericJohn Congdon
X: @johncongdonBluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.socialPHPArch.me: @johnStreams:
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The post The PHP Podcast 2026.03.26 appeared first on PHP Architect.