php[podcast] episodes from php[architect]

php[podcast] episodes from php[architect]

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Episodes

  1. 7 hr ago

    The PHP Podcast 2026.08.20

    PHP Podcast – August 20, 2026 Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling Shirley MacLaine is the answer — but what’s the question? RAM prices went up 500%, GitHub fell over for eight hours, and the crew figured out how you can actually contribute to PHP. Glasses optional. Shirley MacLaine, Green Room Shade, and the Show’s New Normal The episode opens with Joe flustered — not because it’s a “flustered day,” but because there’s shade being thrown in the green room backstage chat. Rather than spoil the drama, the crew turns a mysterious green-room answer into a running bit: “Shirley MacLaine” is the answer, and listeners are invited to submit what the question was. It’s declared the first round of PHP Architect’s Jeopardy, complete with its own Easter egg sound cue. Joe also lays out where the show is heading. Eric and John took over the podcast the previous week to relive their glory days, and the plan is for the old guys to step back to roughly one episode a month. Joe and Sara are working on something to fill one slot, another mystery show is in the works pending signed contracts, and Alive and Kicking is confirmed still alive and kicking after a great recent episode with Derek. Joe also plugs the PHP 8.6 Beta 1 tag and Scott Keck-Warren’s PHP Community Podcast interview with release managers Daniel Scherzer and Matteo Bacotti. The RAM Apocalypse: 500% in Twelve Months The big topic of the week is the ongoing memory and chip crisis. Memory prices have climbed 500% in twelve months, and the crew commiserates about the parts they wish they’d bought bigger. Sara explains the brutal math: you can’t build a semiconductor fab fast enough — two or three years minimum — and by the time one comes online nobody knows if we’ll have overproduction or a burst bubble. Worse, Sara notes that essentially every RAM stick through the end of 2027 is already accounted for and sold to vendors. The ripple effects are everywhere. Console prices are going up instead of down late in their cycle, with next-gen consoles projected to start at $1,000 or more. The hobbyist single-board computer market is getting crushed — Pine64 announced they’re stepping back from making hardware, and a Raspberry Pi 5 that debuted cheap now runs over 100 pounds. Holly’s new PC, bought at the start of 2025, ended up shipped 3,000 kilometers the wrong way to California and is stuck awaiting import paperwork, leaving her leaning on a laptop and some now-precious Raspberry Pi zeros. The nostalgia gets thick as the crew reminisces about DIP chips, EDO RAM, Pentiums, Epson 486s, Tandy 1000s, and the TRS-80. Special venom is reserved for Packard Bell (“utter freaking trash”) and Gateway 2000’s cow-pattern branding — which Sara confirms sold better in Wisconsin than anywhere, though hay bales in a Berkeley storefront still boggle the mind. A chat comment about technicians de-soldering and reballing BGA RAM chips becoming economically viable gets a hearty “absolutely.” Memory-Aware Development and Why PHP 7 Doubled Down Bringing the RAM crisis back to PHP, Joe wishes more developers were aware of how their applications consume and release memory — a lesson he credits to learning enough C back in the day, where you have to manage memory yourself. He connects sloppy memory awareness to the N+1 query problems web developers keep tripping over. Sara drops a great deep dive: a significant reason PHP 7 was roughly twice as fast as PHP 5 was changes in the memory layout. Every variable became referenced by one fewer pointer, and while eight bytes sounds trivial, every level of indirection adds time across every single instruction and access. Sara adds the CPU-level detail — one layer of indirection can be a single instruction on most architectures, but adding a second layer can push a lookup from one instruction to three. That leads into a warm tangent about learning C to become game developers. Sara’s evergreen joke: “I’m going to be a game developer” is the programmer’s version of “I’m going to buy a bar.” Great people, brutal hours, endless competition, and the reality of hitting spacebar 400 times to figure out why you can phase through a wall. The cat-reading-the-paper “I should buy a boat” meme makes an appearance to seal it. The GitHub Outage and the Monoculture Problem Monday’s eight-hour GitHub outage hit the crew directly. Holly couldn’t use a site that only offered “log in with GitHub,” and Joe got kicked out of his CLI auth session mid-PR with no way to re-authenticate. To GitHub’s credit, they published an incident update and a follow-up blog post: a service auto-scaled so aggressively to handle network traffic that the sidecar and supporting services couldn’t keep up, bringing the whole thing down. The conversation turns to whether this is self-inflicted. Joe recalls GitHub’s pre-Microsoft, gold-standard reliability and wonders aloud how much the decline lines up with Copilot’s arrival and internal AI adoption, with uptime reportedly slipping below a single nine at points. Sara defends them somewhat — the number of actions, CPU cores, and pull requests has genuinely hockey-sticked, partly because AI has emboldened people who previously wouldn’t have opened a PR. But as Joe puts it, the call is coming from inside the house, since GitHub itself has been pushing AI. On alternatives, Joe says the least-jarring migration for PHP Architect’s clients would be self-hosting GitLab, since GitHub Actions and GitLab runners are nearly identical in syntax — Atlassian’s Bitbucket, by contrast, is a bridge too far, mostly because the entire ecosystem assumes you’re on GitHub. Sara names this the core problem: monoculture. The crew discusses package mirrors, local caches, 12-factor thinking, and Composer’s support for custom mirrors, all while remembering the PHP repo intrusion years ago that came from an unmaintained self-hosted Git server. The takeaway: owning your pipeline end-to-end is the only way an outage can’t stop you — and Joe teases spinning up a self-hosted GitLab now that “the boss” (Sara) has signed off. How to Contribute to PHP (and Handling Security Reports) The crew highlights two PHP Foundation blog posts. First, Matt Stauffer’s “How to Contribute to PHP,” adapted from a talk he gave at Atlanta PHP. It goes well beyond “learn C,” clearly separating the PHP project, the PHP ecosystem, and the Foundation, and lays out approachable on-ramps: testing pre-releases (PHP 8.6 Beta 1 is out, Beta 2 lands next week), improving documentation, and writing tests — which, spoiler, are written in PHP, not C, using PHP’s own test format that’s simple enough to learn from any single example. Other contribution paths include triaging and reviewing issues across PHP repositories — invaluable work that frees core developers from wading through AI-generated slop bug reports — and participating in internals via the well-documented mailing list process, up to and including running for release manager (8.7 managers will be needed before you know it). Sara points folks to discord.phpc.chat for the PHP Discord, with dedicated Internals and Foundation channels for anyone the mailing list intimidates. Second, Sebastian Bergmann’s “So you received a security report. Now what?” is a jump-around reference for application developers rather than a front-to-back read, walking through roughly ten steps to triage, validate, and resolve reported issues the right way. Sara shares a real-world example from mobile: a flagged package that was only exploitable on a rooted device with an actively hostile package installed alongside it — a very different risk profile than a SQL injection on an API endpoint. Cue reminiscing about writing SQL against Access databases over ODBC from PHP (and Perl) back in the 90s, and Joe’s advice for handling any security report: don’t panic, and always know where your towel is. Links from the show: PHP Tek 2027 — April 27–29, 2027 in Chicago; early bird tickets & hotel available now PHP Tek 2027 CFP Audio versions of the podcast at phparch.com Join us live on Discord at discord.phparch.com PHP Discord — discord.phpc.chat Community Corner Podcast: PHP 8.5 + 8.6 Release Manager Daniel Scherzer Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months So You Received a Security Report. Now What? How to Contribute to PHP Shirley MacLaine Host: Joe Ferguson Mastodon: @joepferguson@phpc.social PHPArch.me: @svpernova09 Sara Golemon Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social Holly Schilling Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace   Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/     OurCVEs Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs   CodeRabbit   Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.   PHP Architect Consulting Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on https://www.phparch.com/consulting/   Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.08.20 appeared first on PHP Architect.

  2. 8 hr ago

    Community Corner Podcast: PHP 8.5 + 8.6 Release Manager Daniel Scherzer

    In this episode, Scott talks with Daniel Scherzer, release manager for PHP 8.5 and PHP 8.6, about the bug-fix release cycle, partial function application coming in 8.6, and his upcoming talks at Longhorn PHP on what’s new in 8.6 and building PHP extensions in Rust. Links Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt Daniel’s Link https://scherzer.dev/ LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-scherzer-520539263/ 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 Podcast: PHP 8.5 + 8.6 Release Manager Daniel Scherzer appeared first on PHP Architect.

  3. 13 Aug

    The PHP Podcast 2026.08.13

    PHP Podcast – August 13, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Eric and John reunite after weeks apart to talk Laracon in Boston, more diverse voices coming to this time slot, CPX finally giving PHP an npx, a stripped-down PHPStorm Light, and PHP Tek’s extended CFP. Stepping Back to Make Room for More Voices Eric and John open by explaining a shift in the show: they’re not disappearing, but they’re stepping back a little so more people from the PHP Architect team can take the mic. As John put it, the goal is “more diverse voices of the community,” and folks like Joe, Sarah, and Holly have been stepping into this time slot. Eric and John have committed to appearing at least once a month, since they have the most holistic view of what’s happening across the company. When they’re on, expect the “inside baseball” episodes — the behind-the-scenes look at what PHP Architect is up to. The rest of the time, this slot will keep going with other hosts, so the show never goes dark. They also reminded listeners there’s both a live stream and an audio RSS feed. Some folks apparently only recently discovered the audio version, while longtime audio listeners never realize the show streams live. Either way, head to phparch.com, click on podcasts, and you’ll find every way to subscribe. Eric’s Laracon Boston Recap Eric attended Laracon in Boston and, as always, has a love/hate relationship with it. On the plus side, it’s where he catches up with a lot of friends, and the talks were solid — Pauline Voss gave a great presentation on JJ (Jujutsu) and atomic commits, and Nuno showed off Pest 5. Eric noted the framework itself is moving much slower now, which is actually a good thing for anyone running a business on it, even if it makes the conference less essential-viewing than it once was. The venue was industrial and good-looking with a fantastic stage setup, but seating was a genuine problem this year. Eric arrived late to Nuno’s talk and there was nowhere to sit; the team scrambled to bring in more chairs. When it rained on day two, they ran out again. Despite that, staying in the same hotel as folks like Eric Barnes, TJ, Jake Bennett, and Michael Dorinda made for the kind of hallway-and-breakfast camaraderie he values most. Eric also hit the social events he usually skips — he sat out dodgeball (bad knees, slip-on shoes, and being a big target), but went to the Laracon Prom, which required an RSVP and an approved request. It turned out to be way cooler than expected, with people fully decked out, DJs, and an after-party plus a VIP dinner where Laravel’s marketing team worked the room. He also caught up with folks like Matthew Weier O’Phinney of Zend/Perforce and had a chat with Taylor. Running the Laravel Magazine Site and Taylor’s Blessing Eric shared that PHP Architect is now running the Laravel Magazine website, which previously belonged to Marijn (Marion) Pop. He’s been publishing tutorials, keeping things current, and making changes to the site he’s proud of. The articles are short, quick reads — and one of the Laravel wrap-up pieces mirrors the same article on the PHP Architect site. At the after-party dinner, Eric took the opportunity to run the name past Taylor directly, since he wasn’t sure the original owner had ever gotten official approval to use the Laravel name for a magazine. Taylor’s response was essentially “that’s fine, don’t worry about it” — so Laravel Magazine lives on. Eric even set up a newsletter signup, though he admits he’s not sure yet whether he’ll actually send a newsletter. CPX — A PHP-World npx One of Eric’s favorite discoveries from Laracon was CPX, essentially the PHP equivalent of npx. Just as npx lets you run JavaScript packages without installing them into a specific project, CPX lets you run tools without a global composer install or a per-project dependency. Eric already swapped his global PHP CS Fixer and Laravel Pint setup over to CPX aliases, so he now always runs the latest version without dependency headaches. John pushed back a bit, pointing out that tools like PHP unit and Rector usually live in your vendor directory anyway because your CI pipeline depends on them. Eric agreed that’s a valid workflow, but framed CPX as ideal for the occasional-use tools and for lowering the barrier for people outside the PHP world who want to dip in without fully committing. Chat chimed in with Rector as a great CPX use case, and they walked through examples like spinning up a fresh Laravel app. Laravel LSP and PHP Storm Light Eric was genuinely excited that Laravel now has its own Language Server Protocol. Most IDEs had already built their own Laravel-aware workarounds, but for Eim’s Neovim setup, the LSP finally makes things like jumping from a route to the view it points to work correctly — something PHP Storm had solved long ago but Vim hadn’t. He also spotted something called PHP Storm Light at the JetBrains booth: a trimmed-down, experimental build with faster startup, lower memory, and fewer features. It’s available through the Toolbox app as an EAP, so it’s free and explicitly experimental. John, who’d been hitting memory limits in regular PHP Storm, decided to install it on the spot, and Joe mentioned using it for one-off file edits — sparking a conversation about whether it fills the gap left by JetBrains’ old standalone editor. PHP Tek CFP Extended + Ticket Options John announced that the PHP Tek call for speakers has been extended through October 31st. The team experimented with opening the CFP very early this year to help attendees whose fiscal-year approvals depend on a locked schedule, but the community felt it was too early to know what would be relevant next April. So they extended the window and made cfp.phptek.io point straight to the call for presenters (thanks to a suggestion from A. Woods). On tickets, they’ve broken out a bundle that includes hotel nights so attendees can hand their boss a single lump-sum figure (airfare not included). There are also food-and-beverage-only tickets for partners and kids, single-day track options, and dedicated days for Laravel, JavaScript, and DevOps — one track each, with the other two tracks running the usual PHP Tek content. John flagged a possible issue with DevOps being the default CFP track, since it’s pulling in a flood of generic, seemingly AI-submitted talks he’ll need to sort through. Links from the show: PHP Tek — CFP extended through October 31, conference + hotel bundle available PHP Tek Call for Presenters OurCVEs — watch your repos and servers for CVEs Host: Eric Van Johnson X: @shocm Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @eric John Congdon X: @johncongdon Mastodon: @john@phparch.social Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @john Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Eric, John, and the team are available for consulting, team augmentation, direction, code review, and even mobile development work. 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 2026.08.13 appeared first on PHP Architect.

  4. 6 Aug

    The PHP Podcast 2026.08.06

    PHP Podcast – August 6, 2026 Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling A sick kitten steals the show, Sara loses a fight with her smart lights, PHP 8.6 beta is almost here, and the crew argues about roadmaps, deprecations, and why you shouldn’t be a meat proxy. Cats, Ice Cream, and Bobbleheads The episode opened with the usual chaos: Holly’s kitten Rosie made a full appearance, having spent the week battling a chest infection that turned into a sinus and ear infection and threw off her balance. Three vet visits later, Rosie was recovering but very cuddly — and apparently convinced Holly’s headset mic was a cat toy. Sara, catless but armed with ice cream, argued that ice cream beats cats because there’s no poop to clean up. The conversation spun into merchandise ideas after Eric dropped a photo of a bobblehead in the Discord. The crew riffed on 3D-printing speaker action figures and bobbleheads for the conference, with Holly getting Eric on record that it “would not be expensive” — a statement immediately screenshotted for posterity. Sara and Holly quickly reminded everyone that multicolor prints are their own painful challenge, and someone with Warhammer 40k painting patience would be required. PHP 8.6 Beta on the Horizon With 8.6 beta 1 landing a week out, the hosts walked through the highlights from the Stitcher.io “what’s new” write-up. Sara was excited about partial function application finally arriving, though Holly isn’t thrilled with the `…` syntax — but couldn’t propose a better one either. They dug into an earlier, unshipped design that used `$1`/`$2` positional placeholders (similar to Swift), and Joe kept circling back to Python-style named arguments before admitting he wasn’t entirely sure he was describing the right feature. They also covered read-only property defaults (a natural follow-on to 8.4’s property hooks on interfaces), the new polling API that’s largely future-facing for threading and concurrency work, the new `clamp()` function, and a long-overdue `Duration` class. Holly repeatedly questioned why something like `clamp()` needs to be in the language at all, with Sara conceding the point but noting PHP is a “kitchen sink language” and that ship has sailed. For `Duration`, Sara made the case that it genuinely belongs in core because it’s tied to the timezone knowledge baked into the underlying date/time library. Deprecations and the Two Populations of PHP Joe pulled up numbers comparing deprecation RFCs across recent versions — roughly 28 proposals for 8.6, 46 for 8.5, 26 for 8.4, just six for 8.3, and none actually voted on for 8.2 (which Sara guessed lined up with Nikita stepping back to work on LLVM, back when deprecations were called “Nikita’s hit list”). Many of the 8.6 deprecations, organized by Gina P. Banyard, aim to free up words to become reserved keywords in future versions. The `list()` deprecation came up as a sore spot: Holly would love to see it gone and never uses it in new code, while Joe worries the blast radius across legacy codebases is enormous. That led Sara to articulate the core tension: there are two very different populations of PHP users — the ones aggressively upgrading and adopting new features (the podcast’s audience), and the ones who just want to run their WordPress site without the language shifting under them. Both groups matter, and the language has to push forward without needlessly breaking the second group. The Roadmap Debate Building on deprecations, the crew wished aloud that PHP had something resembling a roadmap — not set-in-stone dates, but broad aims like “a feature like X might justify bumping to 9.” Joe suggested borrowing from game dev studios, who publish colorful roadmaps with rough years instead of hard dates and don’t crucify anyone when things slip. Holly noted that even the AI she was workshopping a blog post with warned that PHP internals doesn’t handle the word “roadmap” well and to assume any such proposal will fail. Sara, invoking her “lawyer’s advice” not to mention it was a recent meeting topic, pointed out the practical wrinkle: the foundation’s paid developers are largely self-directed, and no one is telling them what donors want them to build. Still, everyone agreed a shared set of goals would be valuable. Holly and Sara also gave a shout-out to the unsung, unsexy work — documentation, triage, bug fixing — that keeps the lights on, and to the foundation’s first quarterly progress report for showing what contractors are actually doing. Longhorn PHP and Travel Logistics Holly announced her Longhorn PHP talk, “That’s Your Website, Not Your Mobile App,” slotted at 2:30 in Austin on October 15–16. The talk is a venting session about her pet peeve: teams wrapping a Laravel/React/whatever website in a native shell and shipping it as an app without bridging the model differences — regardless of tech stack. She noted it’s her first time at Longhorn, though she recently spoke at a Chicago mobile developers meetup exactly one week shy of ten years after her last appearance there. The travel talk sprawled into a would-be road-trip convoy (picking up Joe in Memphis, A. Woods from New York, and even attempting to ferry Sara’s car across the ocean), plus a tangent on how absurdly expensive Amtrak is compared to flying — versus Sara’s 20-euro monthly rail pass in Portugal that covers the entire length of the country. Don’t Be a Meat Proxy The show closed on Niklas Gruhn’s blog post “Don’t Be a Meat Proxy,” which argues against copy-pasting raw AI output at other humans. Joe described his own workflow: read the AI feedback, condense and distill it, rewrite it, and clearly label anything unvetted (robot emoji included) so teammates know he hasn’t verified it yet. Sara pushed the point harder — if you’re just regurgitating what Claude or Gemini said, the person asking could have done that themselves, so you’re not adding value. Holly complicated it with real-world nuance: some coworkers ask questions they could’ve answered themselves, then call you rude when you give a condensed answer and keep poking at its edges. The crew acknowledged a whole gradient exists — from “let me Google that for you” territory to genuine “what’s the best way to approach X” conversations that aren’t fact lookups. Sara, self-professed AI hater, admitted the balance has shifted toward “just search it” because AIs are genuinely good at search — with plenty of deep irony noted about machines being good at reading and grokking information humans don’t want to. Bonus: Holly praised naming xAI’s bot “Grok” as genuinely clever. Links from the show: PHP Tek 2027 — Early bird tickets and hotel block available PHP Tek CFP — Open until the end of the month Longhorn PHP — October 15–16, Austin What’s new in PHP 8.6 (Stitcher.io) PHP Foundation’s quarterly report for Q2 2026 Eric’s Laracon 2026 wrap up PHP Podcast Subscribe Page Hosts: Joe Ferguson Mastodon: @joepferguson@phpc.social PHPArch.me: @svpernova09 Sara Golemon Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social Holly Schilling Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace   Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/     OurCVEs Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs   CodeRabbit   Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.     PHP Architect Consulting   Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on https://www.phparch.com/consulting/   Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.08.06 appeared first on PHP Architect.

  5. 5 Aug

    Community 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.

  6. 4 Aug

    PHP 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: @miller@phpc.social Bluesky: @ccmiller2018.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @miller Mike Page Mastodon: @MikePageDev@phpc.social PHPArch.me: @mikepagedev Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – 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.

  7. 30 Jul

    The 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: @joepferguson@phpc.social PHPArch.me: @svpernova09 Sara Golemon Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social Holly Schilling Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – 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.

  8. 23 Jul

    The PHP Podcast 2026.07.23

    PHP Podcast – July 23, 2026 Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon, and Holly Schilling Eric got ousted from his own show (no pants required), Holly’s elephants are lost somewhere in the U.S., and the crew talks SIMD, PHP 8.6 feature freeze, and whether AI can actually create. Also, socks. A Show Without Pants: The Guest Takeover This week Eric got booted from his own podcast while John was off doing something more important, leaving Holly, Sara, and Producer Joe to run the show. The gang wasted no time reminding everyone that the correct Discord URL is discord.phparch.com — not phparch.com/discord — a mistake that ended up as tomorrow’s task list item for Joe. There was plenty of housekeeping to get through: PHP Tek 2027 lands April 27th through 29th in Chicago, the CFP is open, and the call for papers closes August 31st. Holly, ever the deadline enthusiast, admitted she loves “the sound deadlines make as they whoosh by,” which set the tone for much of the episode. And yes, the swag store now has PHP Architect socks. There was extensive debate about whether the socks are safe for large-footed individuals, whether banana-for-scale photos are needed, and whether Eric should post feet pics. DuckNizzle bought some socks. We are also, apparently, SOC 2 certified. The Great Elephant Migration Sara’s elephant herd is currently scattered across the United States, most of them somewhere between Chicago and California courtesy of U-Haul. With import forms to Portugal not yet ready, the plush pachyderms are taking a scenic detour west before eventually making their way overseas. Only six elephants are currently on hand, and technically none of them are PHP Architect elephants — though one is a PHP Roundtable elephant, prompting the recurring wish that someone should bring that podcast back. Spoiler: they might, more on that later. Sara also shared she’s been in intensive foreign language classes every day, getting up at 7 a.m. while not falling asleep until 2 a.m., all while assembling a Prusa Core One+ 3D printer kit with roughly 300 pages of instructions and hundreds of tiny pieces. SIMD and Data Science in PHP Joe brought a blog post from Mitchell Hashimoto arguing that everyone should know SIMD — Single Instruction, Multiple Data. It’s a form of parallel computing that can dramatically speed up large data processing, offering 8x, 10x, even 100x improvements when you’re working with hundreds of thousands or millions of records. It won’t help you loop over a 100-item array, but it might supercharge a FlowPHP parquet file with millions of rows. Sara pushed back on how deep into the processor this discussion goes, noting that floating point math already flows through the SIMD registers — so in a very narrow sense, you’re already getting SIMD support in current PHP. Reordering instructions safely is another matter entirely (see: Intel’s history of getting it wrong). The conversation tied back to Florian Englehart’s “One Billion Rows” talk at PHP Tek 2025, and Holly mentioned her monomorphic generics work now supports variadic types — meaning a typed vector structure could, with a bit of JIT work, make SIMD-style patterns possible in PHP’s near future. PHP 8.6 Feature Freeze Is Coming Code freeze for PHP 8.6 lands August 11th — less than three weeks out. The release managers admitted they flubbed and missed the five-week warning email that should have gone out July 6th, though the four-week email did go out July 13th and a two-week warning is coming next Monday. Sara, one of PHP’s previous release managers, was philosophical about people panicking at the deadline: you’ve had twelve months, your lack of planning is not the release team’s problem. An idea to move the feature freeze date was floated and quickly shot down — the cadence has been established for years, and one missed email doesn’t change that. Larry got a shout-out for suggesting internals push all new business to September so 8.6 can get properly tested. And Holly declared, in full Benevolent Dictator mode, that the next release simply has to be 9.0 — too many big features to ship for a mere 8.7. AI, Copyright, and Whether Machines Can Create The crew dug into AI, starting with the news that a judge approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright lawsuit settlement — with roughly two-thirds going to lawyers. On the brighter side, Anthropic is giving a million dollars to Code Crew, a Memphis nonprofit building a physical location to offer less-predatory career training. Holly described using AI to implement a new module dereference operator (colon greater-than) that exists nowhere but her own machine, arguing the AI isn’t stealing when it follows precise instructions to generate novel syntax. Sara countered that the LLM isn’t creating so much as blending existing functionality — following instructions rather than inventing. The debate turned philosophical: how much truly new code have humans written in the last decade? We stand on the shoulders of giants, we’re “thinking meat sacks,” and Sara cheerfully accepted the label of “biased anti-clanker bigot.” The Terminator is coming for Larry first, apparently. Foundation Transparency and Household Jira The PHP Foundation published a quarterly progress report authored by Elizabeth, detailing what every contractor and employee has been working on. Holly praised Elizabeth for bringing the transparency the Foundation had long lacked, since devs have a lot of autonomy and asking them what they’re doing is, apparently, the worst. This spiraled into a discussion of household project management — one host’s wife is a project manager, another family installed a Jira instance for their home that the programmer husband absolutely hates, and there’s a gamified house-cleaning app that Holly refuses to adopt for fear she’ll either become obsessed or start a fight over losing. The episode wrapped with talk of finally reviving PHP Roundtable (scheduling permitting), Longhorn PHP acceptances, and gentle ribbing that Eric and John are “getting up in years” and can’t perform with their usual podcast consistency. There’s a pill for that. Links from the show: PHP Tek 2027 — Chicago, April 27–29, CFP closes August 31 PHP Architect Swag Store — now with socks Join our Discord Hosts: Joe Ferguson Mastodon: @joepferguson@social.social PHPArch.me: @svpernova09 Sara Golemon Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social Holly Schilling Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace   Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/     OurCVEs Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs   CodeRabbit   Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.   PHP Architect Consulting   Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on https://www.phparch.com/consulting/   Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.23 appeared first on PHP Architect.

  9. 22 Jul

    Community Corner Podcast: Firefly III with James Cole

    In this episode, Scott talks with James Cole, creator of Firefly III, an open source personal finance manager. James explains why he built Firefly III after graduating college with student debt, how the rule engine automates transaction categorization, importing bank data with CSV files and third-party connectors like enable banking and GoCardless, and how to get started without importing years of history. Links: Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt James’s Links: Firefly III – https://www.firefly-iii.org/ Scott’s Links: Website – https://scott.keck-warren.com/ Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/scottkeckwarren.bsky.social LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-keck-warren-91689810/ Mastodon – https://phpc.social/@scottkeckwarren PHP Architect Social Media: X: https://x.com/phparch Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com Discord: https://discord.phparch.com Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/ Partners This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners. Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ PHPScore Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore https://phpscore.com/ CodeRabit CodeRabbit – Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. https://www.coderabbit.ai/ Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ #phpc #php #communityCornerPodcast #podcast #FireflyIII #PersonalFinance #OpenSource The post Community Corner Podcast: Firefly III with James Cole appeared first on PHP Architect.

  10. 17 Jul

    The PHP Podcast 2026.07.16

    PHP Podcast – July 16, 2026 Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon, and Holly Schilling Joe hosts with Sarah and Holly while running on no sleep. The PHP Tech 2027 CFP opens, a fake PHP 9 pitch appears, we crown Holly the accidental main character of internals, and everyone agrees dark mode flashing white is a war crime. PHP Tech 2027 CFP Is Open (And Yes, the Year Is Right This Time) The big news kicking off the show is that the PHP Tech CFP for 2027 is live and open. You can find it over at Sessionize under php-tech-2027, and unlike a certain demo from the previous week, the date on it is actually correct. There was a brief moment where it displayed 2007, but the team fixed that rather quickly, so credit where credit is due. The crew marveled at the fact that we are somehow less than six months out from 2027, which spiraled into a conversation about kids getting learner’s permits, full beards showing up on children who were toddlers just yesterday, and whether anyone’s offspring might actually submit a talk. Helldivers came up. Freedom was spread. And there was a gentle suggestion that SoCalKid and their newly engaged fiancé should be sent the CFP URL immediately. Meanwhile, PHP Tech 2026 videos are rolling out on PHP Tech TV. There are currently 37 available with more still processing thanks to some technical and room issues at the event. Several talks are completely free, including Joe’s talk on modernizing DevOps, Kaylin’s “Modernize Your Old School Endpoints with HTMX,” and both of Ben Ramsey’s talks. Working Groups, Discord, and the People Who Actually Care The conversation turned to the internals process and Ben Ramsey’s working group proposal on the internals mailing list, which the crew encouraged everyone to actually read. The idea of giving working groups some autonomy and even decision-making power drew broad agreement as a way to produce more fully-fleshed RFCs rather than one person’s implementation of a giant feature. A recurring point of confusion is the reference to “Discord conversations” in RFCs. There is no official PHP.net Discord, but phpc.chat will get you to the Discord (and previously the bridged IRC). The PHP Internals channel is where a lot of discussion happens, though far from the only place, and there are also the PHP Foundation and new Foundation Ambassadors channels. Big appreciation went out to the moderators keeping that Discord spam-free and troll-free, with a special shout to Tiffany, who is an absolute machine at helping people, pointing them in the right direction, and posting top-tier cat pictures in the pet flexing channel. The recurring theme: decisions are made by the people who show up. Silence is acquiescence, and if you have issues, speak up. Holly famously just showed up in internals one day, started talking, and they let her stay. This Week in Internals and the Co-Scientist Show Joe wanted to highlight Artisan Build’s YouTube channel, specifically their “This Week in Internals” videos. They are fantastic recaps of what’s happening in the internals world, complete with a very light sprinkling of extremely dry comedic timing that lands perfectly. The videos break down email threads and RFCs into easily digestible summaries of what people are arguing over, then poke a little fun at the sillier arguments. A weekly recap drops regularly and it’s consistently great content for anyone curious about internals. The crew was also impressed by the host’s ability to nail every name pronunciation on what seems like the first try, which spiraled into Holly’s confession that she has a hard memory limit on names learned after kindergarten. Anyone new is simply “out of bounds.” Holly’s Fake PHP 9 Pitch: Structs, Modules, and Surfaces Holly walked through a blog post on eventuallywrong.com featuring a fake PHP 9 pitch full of flagship features she’s prototyped. It kicked off with extensions, which she discovered didn’t exist while trying to build the Longhorn app in native PHP, landing her at the top of that internals video. Next came structs, which started as an attempt to build tuples (turns out full structs were easier). They’re Swift-style value types with strong typing, and after some grumbling at Larry, she reworked things to support interfaces and traits, leaning into composition over inheritance. Modules got the PHP-style treatment: a simple module definition, a public interface declaration, and a new `internal` visibility level that lets members be accessed within the same module. No autoloader modifications required, and reflection remains the escape hatch as always. Finally, surfaces — a keyword that adds a perpendicular-to-visibility scope. A method can belong to a surface, and callers simply declare they want to use that surface of the class. Holly performance-tested it: no impact if unused, minimal impact if used. She also spent a good chunk of the show against friend classes, arguing they’re leaky, unrestricted, and if you’re going to hand out full access to your privates, you shouldn’t have marked them private in the first place. Release Management, Version Stats, and Upgrade Paths Holly is a first-time PHP 8.6 release manager alongside Matteo Beccati, with veteran Daniel Scherzer (also on 8.5) rounding out the team. She stepped down from RM in a prior election because others wanted the work — a reminder that people stepping up in open source is a rarity worth celebrating. Release management, she noted, is less a social job and more about moving data at the right time and signing things. The July 2026 PHP version stats got a thumbs up. Looking at the trends, 8.5 is clearly on the rise, 8.4 climbing slightly, 8.3 starting to trend down, and 8.2 falling harder — exactly the curve you want, with the vast majority sitting inside the support window. Joe shared that upgrading apps from PHP 7 to 8.3/8.4/8.5 has been a much easier lift than the older 7.x hops, thanks to a more consistent release cadence and better deprecation guidance. Holly pushed back on the idea that 5.6-to-7 was ever hard, while Joe pointed out the real pain came from jumping ancient 5.0/5.1 codebases straight to 7 back before Claude existed. There was also a very in-depth debugging tangent about an opcache build flag no longer being needed on 8.5. Accessibility, Dark Mode Crimes, and the JetBrains Survey The JetBrains State of PHP survey is open, and everyone should go take it — there’s even a chance to win one of five vouchers. This led to a discussion about whether JetBrains usage is being decimated by AI tooling, with Holly living almost entirely in the terminal with Claude Code these days while Joe remains loyal to PHPStorm and PyCharm. Sarah, who is going blind and is not joking about it, kicked off a passionate segment on accessibility. Test your apps with a screen reader. Respect font scaling and contrast (F0F0F0 text on white is a genuine crime). Respect the OS toggles for reduced motion, because autistic users and others depend on them and apps routinely ignore them. The crew then united around dark mode etiquette: the only reasonable default is system-selected, and the white flash between two dark-mode pages is caused by JavaScript-based theme switching instead of sane CSS selectors. It is, universally agreed, the worst. The episode closed on eye-tracking privacy (Apple Vision Pro good, Oculus terrifying), heat maps, and a laptop-camera-covering tangent that got appropriately unhinged before Joe called it on that bombshell. Links from the show: PHP Tech 2027 CFP — Now open on Sessionize eventuallywrong.com — Holly’s fake PHP 9 pitch phpc.chat — Get to the PHP Discord store.phparch.com — Now with socks Hosts: Joe Ferguson Mastodon: @joepferguson@social.social PHPArch.me: @svpernova09 Sara Golemon Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social Holly Schilling Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners 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.

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