Podcasts about Laravel

PHP Podcast – July 9, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon | Guest: Holly Schilling A PHP RFC for extension methods that PHP definitely should have had by now. Holly Schilling, Uninvited but Welcome Holly was originally just planning to heckle from the Discord chat room. She had about 45 minutes’ notice before the show that she’d be on camera instead, which she took in stride — minus the PHP swag shirt she would have worn if she’d known. Eric is happy to hand her the show; she’s been in the backstage feed and notes that the zero-latency view means she actually gets the jokes, unlike the 3–5 second delay that makes jokes land after everyone’s moved on. PHP Tek 2027 CFP: Now Open The call for papers for PHP Tek 2027 is open, and the deadline is end of August. This year, PHP Tek is doing three tracks: two traditional PHP-focused tracks and a third rotating track that will change each day — one day dedicated to AI talks, one to Laravel talks, one to DevOps talks. The goal is to get submissions in and the schedule published early enough that attendees can put it in their budget before their fiscal year closes. Holly (who now manages the submission review) has a note for repeat submitters: if your talk was accepted and given at a previous PHP Tek, don’t submit it again. Also: bot submissions from automated systems that spam every CFP in SessionEyes are a real problem, and Holly’s job is to filter them out before the blind evaluation round begins. The evaluation process is designed to keep Eric and John out of the loop until after the first pass — so they can’t accidentally influence votes for speakers they already like. PHP Tek 2027 Hotel + Conference Bundle Brief reprise from last week: the hotel and conference bundle is available at phptek.io — one price that includes your conference pass, hotel nights, and conference lunches and breakfasts, designed to make the ask to a manager or CFO as simple as possible. Eric is working on a short video to explain it rather than just dumping pricing on the homepage. Joe Ferguson at Merge PHP — Today Joe Ferguson — PHP Architect team member and co-release manager of PHP 8.6 — is presenting at Merge PHP immediately after this podcast wraps. His talk: “Ansible for PHP Developers: Configure, Deploy, and Update Your Infrastructure.” Eric was trying to reach Joe for an hour before the show (Joe was apparently already in the Merge PHP stream watching the podcast). If you’re listening after the fact, the recording may be available. Holly’s RFC: Class Extension Methods Holly has spent the past week doing a caffeine-fueled deep dive into PHP internals C code and has come out the other side with a draft RFC and working proof-of-concept code for class extension methods — a feature she kept assuming PHP had, tried to write, and found didn’t exist. The idea: you can add methods to an existing class without subclassing it. Swift has this, Kotlin has it, C# has it. The canonical PHP example is something like adding isWeekday() or isWeekend() to DateTimeImmutable — you get to call it as an instance method on the native class, not on a subclass you’d have to propagate everywhere. Under the hood it’s syntactic sugar: the implementation in C# is a static method with the class passed as the first parameter, and Holly is taking a similar approach. No performance penalty — a few people have already tested it. Early concern about performance impact has not materialized. The feature naturally extends to scalar methods, which Laracon’s Levi Koop and others have discussed: the ability to write $str->length() instead of strlen($str). This part is harder because $this in PHP must always be an object, so scalars need special hooks to work as receivers. That complexity is why Holly broke the implementation into three phases. She has posted GitHub Gists rather than a formal PHP wiki RFC so far — she submitted for a wiki account yesterday and is waiting to hear back. Outlook has been eating her PHP internals mailing list emails (treating new posters as spam), so she’s in the process of switching to a new email address. Joe Ferguson is in the chat offering to help expedite the wiki account. Feedback is coming in, changes are being made, and this is moving toward a formal RFC. Holly’s motivation is pure: she built this for herself because she needed it. Eric quoted himself from the “PHP Ugly Days” era, telling the community that if there’s a feature you want and nobody’s building it, it’s on you. Holly has resented and credited that line in equal measure ever since. NativePHP Mobile: Holly Is Building the Longhorn App Holly has started building a conference app for Longhorn PHP using NativePHP Mobile. Eric’s reaction ranges between excitement (someone’s doing it!) and mild betrayal (it’s not for PHP Tek). Holly also submitted a talk to Longhorn PHP about what actually distinguishes a real native mobile app from a website wrapped in an app shell — and the answer isn’t the language, the transitions, or the scroll animations. It’s state management. Native apps treat the local device copy as authoritative or at minimum authoritative enough that you’re not reaching the server for every interaction. Web apps don’t do this; native apps have to. Holly has real-world context here: one of her earlier jobs was building the Chicago Sun-Times native app and then white-labeling it for 70+ publications across the country. She says she’d never do that again. Every single publication has brand style guidelines, logo clearance zones, and color adjacency rules. Multiply that by 70 and you start to understand why white-labeling at scale is a nightmare. Longhorn PHP CFP — Closes Tomorrow The call for papers for Longhorn PHP is open through tomorrow night (July 10). It had been briefly reported as closed last week; it got extended. If you want to speak at Longhorn, head to cfp.longhornphp.com now. The conference is in Austin at the Holiday Inn. WordPress: Stewardship, Backward Compatibility, and the Laravel Fork Question Holly’s experience white-labeling apps prompted a broader conversation about WordPress — specifically a genuine acknowledgment of how technically impressive it is that a WordPress installation can look completely different from any other, at the scale WordPress operates. Eric respects the technical accomplishment but has longstanding criticism of how WordPress positioned itself in relation to the PHP community. His view: WordPress was the Laravel of its day, arguably the thing that kept PHP relevant for a decade. But rather than leaning into the broader PHP ecosystem and pushing the language forward from the inside — the way Facebook tried to (even if it eventually forked into HHVM/Hack) — WordPress was laser-focused on backwards compatibility. The result was that PHP internals couldn’t move as fast as it might have because WordPress’s enormous install base created a de facto veto on any change that would have required sites to update. Holly pushed back gently: WordPress’s backwards compatibility constraint wasn’t really a choice they could have made differently given the scale of self-hosted installs and third-party plugins. Eric acknowledges the constraint while still wishing they’d engaged more with internals. The Hack language comes up as a counterpoint: HHVM/Hack, whatever its ultimate fate, was the provocation that woke up PHP internals. PHP 7’s massive performance improvements and modern type system features largely came out of internals saying “Hack has a point, let’s do this properly.” Almost every good idea from Hack eventually got ported into PHP. Eric’s darker hypothetical: if Laravel today had an existential need for a PHP feature that internals kept rejecting, and Taylor Otwell forked PHP — that could be a genuine death blow to the ecosystem. Holly thinks the community would survive; Eric thinks the math on maintaining a language fork is nastier than it looks. Composer, Supply Chain Security, and the 48-Hour Question A viewer asked whether Composer has a way to skip packages released in the last 48 hours when running an update — the motivation being supply chain attacks, where a compromised package gets published and immediately picked up by the next composer update run. Eric’s short answer: not natively, and the real mitigation is to not run composer update blindly. Holly points out the harder version of this problem: languages like Swift allow pre-compiled binary packages, which are far scarier than source packages because you can’t even do a code review. Eric mentions that Packagist and Composer have been doing real work on supply chain integrity (covered on the show a few weeks back). If you want the deeper treatment, Eric Mann’s upcoming Security Corner column in the July issue of PHP Architect covers exactly this — Composer and the PHP supply chain. Look for it in the next few weeks. Eric’s Laptop Saga, Chapter N The new “clean install” MacBook Pro that Eric has been using to solve his connectivity issues dropped partway through the show. Eric switched to his older laptop (which was still running and still connected), but couldn’t get his camera to re-appear in the stream source list, couldn’t add himself back, and eventually gave up and wrapped up audio-only. John and Holly carried the last few minutes. The older laptop that never dropped is now, apparently, the better one. Eric is running out of explanations and considering a career in farming. Links from the show: PHP Tek 2027: Call for Speakers @ Sessionize.com PHP RFC: Extension Methods · GitHub PHP RFC: Scalar Extension Methods · GitHub php-rfc_Extensions+Visibility.md · GitHub Longhorn PHP Conference 2026 Host: Eric Van Johnson X: @shocm Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @eric John Congdon X: @johncongdon Mastodon: @john@phparch.social Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @john Guest: Holly Schilling PHP internals contributor; author of the Surfaces RFC and now Class Extensions RFC Primary mobile developer; built the PHP Tek 2026 conference app; building the Longhorn PHP app in NativePHP Mobile Based near Chicago, IL Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ OurCVEs Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs CodeRabbit Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.09 appeared first on PHP Architect.

Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.Show linksRoute Metadata Support in Laravel 13.17Worker Metrics on the WorkerStopping Event in Laravel 13.18Help make Filament faster!Clonio CLI: Clone Production Databases With Anonymized DataA Copy/Paste Detector CLI for PHP 8.5+EnvKit: A Local Development Stack for Laravel on Windows and macOSMonitor and Control Schedules, Queues, and Errors in Laravel with WatchtowerYammi Audit Log: Track Who Really Made a Change Across Jobs and QueuesUSAIGE: Track Token Usage and Costs for Laravel AI SDK RequestsTurn PHP Attributes Into Docs With SignalLaravel WhatsApp: Two Backends Behind One Facade Laravel AI Tasks: An AI Orchestration Package for Queues, Logging, and Cost ControlTutorialsShip AI with Laravel: Failover, Queues, and Middleware for AI AgentsShip AI with Laravel: Test Your AI System with Zero API Calls

PHP Podcast – July 2, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Eric’s new laptop won’t share its screen. John lost a fight with a leaf blower. PHP 8.6 alpha dropped. 100+ people showed up to make PHP seem cool again. Normal show. Eric’s Fresh Install and the Screen That Wouldn’t Share Eric has been wrestling with connectivity drops for weeks, and this week he took drastic action: a fresh install on an older MacBook Pro with almost nothing on it. He installed exactly three apps — 1Password, Ghosty, and Tailscale — and is running Discord and Slack through Safari to minimize variables. The irony is immediate: the new setup can’t share its screen during the show, something that was a central part of what they planned to cover. He hits every macOS security dialog in real time, can never quite get there, and eventually gives up and goes verbal. The fresh-install theory is that one of his previously installed apps was causing his streaming dropouts. Whether it worked is TBD, but at least he stayed connected. PHP Architect July Issue — Published Live John published this month’s magazine live on the show — walked through the admin steps in real time, which Eric found appropriately chaotic. The monster feature article this month is “Building Secure REST APIs for Healthcare Applications with PHP and Laravel,” running 21–22 pages, making it likely the longest single feature they’ve ever run without splitting it across issues. The page count is mostly because of the volume of code samples. It will not be the free article of the month, which Eric admitted immediately creates extra work for John. Eric also noticed for the first time that Edward Bernard has an ad running in the magazine (Wizard’s Lens, his book) — which has apparently been there for a while. John’s Week: Leaf Blower, Racquetball, and AI Pull Requests John started the week by getting hit in the eyebrow with a leaf blower. The full story: his wife wanted the leaves blown off the top of the pergola, he figured out he could push the leaf blower up there and let gravity return it to his hand like a boomerang, it worked three times, and on the fourth attempt it went straight to the eyebrow. He’s on enough medications that he bruises instantly. He then played racquetball, found himself in an extended session with an 80-year-old and a much better 35-year-old, took a hard ball to the back of the leg, and is expecting to regret it tomorrow. On the development side: he’s still reviewing pull requests where roughly 80% of the code is written by Claude and submitted by non-developers. He talked to one of the authors about it, and the author’s response was that he does learn from John’s feedback — he reads it, tells Claude about it, and asks Claude not to do it again. John is… accepting of this. Laravel Verbs, Eloquent Hooks, and a Client Project That May Be Back A previous client project — originally built in Laravel 7, heavily involving event sourcing — may be reviving. Eric spent the last few weeks using Claude to walk the application from Laravel 7 to Laravel 13, then tackle the event sourcing library migration. The original library is no longer maintained, so Eric and Claude moved everything to Laravel Verbs. Eric has a nuanced view of Verbs: it’s great for developers new to event sourcing because it’s approachable, but gets a little murky when you start talking about projections in Laravel terms versus event sourcing terms. To police CRUD operations and ensure nothing bypasses Verbs, Claude suggested hooking into Eloquent’s lifecycle callbacks — so whenever any CRUD action is called on a model, it first fires through Verbs. Eric loved this; John had reservations, arguing it inverts the paradigm (the change causes the event rather than the event causing the change). Eric’s counterpoint: the Eloquent hook fires before the model touches the database, so Verbs still logs first, and it solves the very real problem of a developer seeing a venues table and just using the model directly. Holly, watching in the Discord chat, noted that Verbs calls the aggregate root a “state” rather than using the standard event sourcing term “root” — which is exactly the kind of terminology drift Eric finds frustrating about Verbs, even as he thinks it’s the right tool for this project. The client meeting itself went well; their CFO grasped event sourcing immediately because it maps perfectly to accounting ledgers, where every entry is permanent and any correction requires its own entry and explanation. Laracon and NativePHP Mobile Laracon is July 28–29, and Eric is going. NativePHP Mobile is holding a one-day mini-conference immediately after on July 30 — “Vibes with Native PHP” — for an additional $129. Eric is likely not staying for it due to flight constraints, but he used it as an excuse to hype NativePHP mobile again. He’s been talking about this project for a while and still hasn’t shipped a real app with it himself, which frustrates him. His pitch: if you’re a PHP developer who has ever wanted to do mobile development and found the barrier too steep, this is the moment. NativePHP is pushing more native functionality on both iOS and Android, the license fees are gone, and the project is in its second wave. There is also an ongoing campaign — which Eric is actively encouraging in this episode — to pressure Holly Schilling into building the PHP Tek conference app using NativePHP Mobile. Surfaces RFC & Friends RFC Holly’s Surfaces RFC came up briefly — Eric wanted to discuss it more but they ran out of time, mostly because Holly was busy in the Discord getting called out for doing a conference app for Longhorn PHP. The short version: the Friends RFC (in discussion) allows a class to explicitly grant another class access to its private properties without requiring inheritance — the canonical use case is a builder that needs to set private fields on an object without requiring setters, which would make those fields effectively public. Holly’s Surfaces RFC extends the idea to roles rather than just specific classes. Eric and John agree they need to have Holly on as a guest to actually discuss it properly — a plan they’ve now made twice. Chris Miller Submits a PR to PHP Core Their team member Chris Miller found a bug in the PHP JIT compiler: code that goes through the JIT was returning a different result than the same code without the JIT, specifically with the bitwise NOT operator. He opened an issue, looked at the C code, figured out the cause, and submitted a pull request to fix it. The same fix already existed for the bitwise OR and XOR operators — this PR adds the bitwise NOT. Eric loves this kind of story: a developer using PHP, noticing something odd, going all the way to the C source to understand why, and contributing a fix rather than just filing a bug. There’s a known separate JIT issue in PHP 8.5 tracing mode affecting background workers (not the main application); Eric upgraded his client’s app to 8.5 and ran into it, and believes it’s addressed in 8.5.7. PHP 8.6.0 Alpha 1 — Released Today Joe Ferguson — their friend, PHP community member, and occasional target of friendly on-air ribbing — released PHP 8.6.0 Alpha 1 today. Joe is one of the release managers for PHP 8.6, with Daniel Scherzer serving as the senior release manager (the PHP Foundation recently updated the title from “mentor”). Eric and John congratulated Joe warmly, mostly by pointing out that Chris Miller is smarter than Joe. Joe was apparently on the PHP Foundation Ambassador call as well. PHP Tek 2027: Hotel + Conference Bundle PHP Tek 2027 is doing something new this year: an optional bundle where you can buy your conference ticket and hotel stay together. Two options — three nights (Mon–Wed) or four nights (Mon–Thu). The pitch: one all-in number is easier to take to a manager or a CFO than itemizing conference pass, lunches, breakfasts, and lodging separately. Eric and John are explicit that they make less money doing it this way; the benefit is that your room is booked immediately when you pay, so you won’t forget and find rooms sold out later. Breakfast in the room is free for the first person, half price for a second person in the same room. Dinners and travel are still on you. CFPs: Find-a-Conference and Longhorn PHP Someone in the community pointed Eric to a website aggregating call-for-papers listings across conferences — not PHP-specific, and not geographically locked to the US. Useful if you’re a speaker (or want to be one) and want to see where to submit. Eric mentioned it as a resource for PHP community members to speak at non-PHP conferences, which the community generally doesn’t do enough. Specifically: Longhorn PHP’s CFP is open until July 10 at cfp.longhornphp.com. That’s one week from now as of this recording. PHP Foundation Ambassador Program Eric joined the PHP Foundation’s new Ambassador Program and attended its first meeting. He expected a modest turnout — the meeting had 114 people in the call. Three of them were from PHP Architect. Elizabeth Barron organized it and was apparently worried nobody would show up; Eric was not worried. The program’s focus is getting the word out about PHP to new developers and making the language feel more approachable — something the community has been trying to do for years without a coordinating structure. There was one slide. They talked about the slide for the whole meeting. There are multiple programs under the Foundation you can sign up for (including security-focused groups); you sign up via a Google Form, you don’t have to speak in the meetings, and it’s open to anyone regardless of PHP skill level. Eric’s one note to Elizabeth: please don’t make the coordination mechanism a mailing list. AI Note Takers — The Open Meeting Debate Eric’s AI note taker was running in the Foundation meeting, and some attendees objected. Eric is a defender of AI note takers: he gets summaries, can reference meetings later, and gets a Monday morning digest of the previous week. His position is that banning agents from an open, public meeting doesn’t prevent recording — it just means the notes disappear into the ether. For genuinely sensitive work — he describes a government-adjacent client where developers need background checks and fingerprints — he’s fully supportive of restrictions and will pull his agent without complaint. For an open PHP Foundation meeting, he finds the concern disproportionate, and says if agents are banned outright, he’d stop participating because he doesn’t have the bandwidth to rely on someone else’s notes. He also acknowledged that the irony was not lost on him: the same AI capability that makes voice recording feel threatening also makes it trivially easy to deepfake a voice regardless of whether an agent was in the room. Ethical Ads Tessa mentioned a developer-focused advertising platform called Ethical Ads on a recent Live and Kicking episode. Eric found it interesting enough to flag on the show — it’s an ad network specifically for developer-focused content that emphasizes privacy and non-tracking approaches. Eric and John are always trying to figure out better ways to promote PHP Architect, the magazine, and PHP Tek; this may be worth exploring as an alternative to standard ad networks that don’t align well with developer sensibilities. Links from the show: OurCVEs.com — Track your security posture across GitHub repos and servers (created by Artisan Build) Laravel Magazine — Under PHP Architect PHP Tek 2027 — Conference + hotel bundle available (phptek.io) Longhorn PHP CFP — Open until July 10 Ethical Ads — Developer-focused advertising PHP Tech TV — PHP Tek 2026 talks PHP Architect Discord Surfaces RFC · GitHub JIT: Inline ZEND_BW_NOT by millerphp · Pull Request #22560 · php/php-src · GitHub All active call for papers – CfP Watch The PHP Ambassador Program is Open — The PHP Foundation — Supporting, Advancing, and Developing the PHP Language The PHP Foundation Special Interest Groups General Interest Form Host: Eric Van Johnson X: @shocm Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @eric John Congdon X: @johncongdon Mastodon: @john@phparch.social Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @john Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ OurCVEs Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs CodeRabbit Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.02 appeared first on PHP Architect.

New Tools purchased Fanttik Slim V8 Apex Car Vacuum – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D8T3LTNN Great for the car to get down the sides of the seats Hose attachment great to get into the 3d printer Can be used for keyboards and electronic devices Fanttik F2 Master Mini Cordless Rotary Tool – https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F3CPRZXW Lots of attachments for drilling, sanding, polishing etc. Perfect for post-processing 3d prints Making what you do even better – improving all the time Video of recent party which came out great Updating promotional photos on a regular basis Personal Website – next version Decided on Laravel and Vue.js Lots of syncing which can break the site very easily Thinking about the structure better Better analysis and stats in real time Data Stories which are specific articles looking at the data Tracking all the fuel costs for the car Making data meaningful Knowing what you want to achieve with the data Seeing the changes over time and why the changes happened Catch problems before they become a problem Making a decision on how the data is presented and how you can search through it Target Audience is Taylor – and no-one else Adding redundancy with the imports to check everything is being brought in Visit the website: https://www.thisweekwith.co.uk Drayson Design Website – https://www.draysondesign.com The Creative Tinker Website – https://www.thecreativetinker.com Facebook: https://www.thisweekwith.co.uk/facebook Youtube: https://www.thisweekwith.co.uk/youtube * Full transcript will be available on the website. We may receive a referral fee from any of our links which help towards the costs involved in creating this content for you.

PHP Podcast – June 25, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Eric and John are back. Sara and Holly did a better job. Eric’s computer still hates him. Eric’s Connectivity Saga: A Possible Resolution For weeks, Eric has been dealing with a maddening streaming issue — he could see and hear everyone, but nobody could hear or see him. It only happened during Zoom, Slack huddles, and Restream sessions. No one could explain it, including Eric. The apparent fix came by accident: while helping his kid troubleshoot a similar issue, Eric pulled up his own DNS settings and discovered they were only pointing to his router with no upstream fallback. He manually added Google’s 8.8.8.8 and Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 — and for the first time in weeks, had zero issues all week. Does DNS explain streaming dropouts? Almost certainly not. Does it appear to have fixed it? So far, yes. Computers are stupid. Eric needs to retire and open a landscaping business. Two Weeks Off: Road Trip, Pittsburgh, and a Graduation John took the family on a road trip that included national park hikes, biking across the Golden Gate Bridge, and a swing through Universal Studios. Eric headed to Pittsburgh, technically West Virginia, for his niece’s high school graduation. Eric came away impressed with how much Pittsburgh has changed: what was once a gritty steel city has quietly become a genuinely beautiful place. He’s half-serious about looking at it as a future PHP Tek location. Sara and Holly: The Better Hosts Eric and John opened with a heartfelt thank-you to Sara Golemon and Holly Schilling for covering the last two weeks. John’s take: Sara and Holly showed up with documents, had a plan, and ran a tighter show. He’s joking about handing over the keys — mostly. PHP Architect Takes Over Laravel Magazine Here’s the announcement Eric was teasing before the break: PHP Architect has taken over the Laravel Magazine brand. It was originally a Statamic, which Eric rebuilt from scratch over the past couple of weeks. No plans to create a print magazine — it will remain a web-only publication. Eric is thinking about opening it to outside contributors, and there’s a real possibility of a dedicated Laravel column eventually appearing in the PHP Architect magazine. The new consulting section Eric built for the site looks sharp enough that John immediately pointed out it looks better than what’s currently on phparch.com. Foam Burner Feature: Proof of Concept Wars John got a big feature in Foam Burner across the finish line — or at least mostly across — recorded a screencast, and sent it off to the people who care. The immediate response: a list of compliance concerns and edge cases. This is a proof of concept. John is sympathetic, having just had to tell Eric the same thing about Laravel Magazine. The cycle of building something you’re proud of and then having someone find the things that aren’t done yet is a universal developer experience. Code Review in the Age of AI — What’s the Point? John is in a strange spot: he’s doing careful code review on pull requests written entirely by Claude, submitted by non-developers. His detailed, educational feedback — the kind meant to help a developer understand why something was done a particular way — is just being fed back into Claude to generate revisions. Nobody’s learning anything. An incident during his vacation reinforced why the reviews matter: someone deployed AI-generated code that wasn’t well reviewed, it broke overnight, and the team had to revert it the next morning. His position: keep reviewing, even if the audience is an AI. But the nature of what you’re reviewing for has to change — you’re no longer nurturing a developer; you’re being a gate. Eric’s broader point: if you’re a developer who cares about the craft, don’t let AI make you lazy. Learn from how it implements things. Ask it why. The thing that will differentiate developers when AI really matures is genuine understanding of what the code is doing — and that only comes from staying curious. PHP Generics RFC — Closed The Generics RFC was shut down while Eric and John were away, and Eric is genuinely disappointed. The proposal was for syntax-only generics: type annotations that static analyzers could read but that would be stripped at the opcode level, meaning no runtime performance impact. The goal was to standardize the generics syntax so PHPStan, Psalm, and other tools all read it the same way — right now they each implement their own dialect. Sara voted no (she explained her reasoning in the June 17 episode). Joe abstained. Whether an active abstain requires a deliberate action or is the default for a non-vote is apparently still a matter of some debate. PHP Tek 2026 Talks Now on PHP Tech TV Talks from PHP Tek 2026 are being uploaded to phptech.tv. Subscribers can watch the full library. Several speakers have given permission to make their talks free, and Ben Ramsey’s is one of them. John also added video progress tracking to the platform — it now remembers how far into a video you’ve watched. This Week in PHP Internals (Artisan Build) While looking for a PHP Internals podcast that Nuno appears to have started (possibly in connection with the PHP Foundation after PHPverse), Eric stumbled on a different show: This Week in PHP Internals, hosted on the Artisan Build site, with four episodes out. Eric doesn’t know who runs it but says it’s good — short, focused, and gets to the point. He’s also still looking for confirmation on what exactly Nuno’s new podcast is and who it’s for. For reference: the original PHP Internals podcast was Derick Rethans’ show, which he hasn’t updated in four or five years. The ecosystem growing new shows is a good sign. PHP Friends RFC — Under Discussion John has been watching the friends RFC, currently in the discussion phase. The idea: a class can explicitly declare another class as a “friend,” granting it access to private properties without requiring inheritance. The canonical use case is a builder pattern — a UserBuilder that needs to set private fields on User without a thousand public setters, and without making those fields non-private. Holly, in chat, noted that the friend model is a special case of a “surfaces” model she proposed a few years back. She also shared that Swift doesn’t have protected at all (just public and private) — something she initially found frustrating but has come to appreciate. Eric admits he’s been guilty of abusing inheritance over the years and is more thoughtful about it now. The RFC is still under discussion; no vote yet. Eric Drops PHPStorm — Falls Back in Love with Vim Eric canceled his JetBrains All Products subscription. Not because there’s anything wrong with PHPStorm — he’s explicit about that — but because he’s been doing so much work via Claude Code and making only targeted, smaller changes himself that the license fee no longer made sense. His replacement workflow: VS Code for some things, Vim for others. The Vim part was supposed to be supplemental. Instead, his terminal has taken over: it went from a panel alongside PHPStorm to taking up two-thirds of his screen to now living on its own separate virtual desktop. He’s running Spotify in the terminal. He briefly ran Slack in the terminal. He uses Tmux religiously. “I have problems,” he acknowledged. He would not take this back. Links from the show: Laravel Magazine — Now under PHP Architect PHP Tech TV — PHP Tek 2026 talks now uploading PHP RFC Wiki — All RFCs under discussion PHP Tek 2027 — April 27–29 (phptek.io) PHP Architect Discord Host: Eric Van Johnson X: @shocm Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @eric John Congdon X: @johncongdon Mastodon: @john@phparch.social Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @john Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ PHPScore Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore CodeRabbit Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.25 appeared first on PHP Architect.

Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.Show linksJSON Schema Deserialization in Laravel 13.14Typed Translation Accessors in Laravel 13.15.0The artisan dev Command in Laravel 13.16.0The State of PHP 2026 Survey Is Now OpenLaracon US 2026 Reveals Its Full Speaker LineupHow We Cached Laravel News at the Edge with Fast LaravelWatch the Teaser for 'The Story of PHP' DocumentaryShowcase Your PhpStorm Expertise on LinkedInRefresh Your Laravel Database Without Dropping Every TableVersion-Controlled Documentation Inside Your Laravel App with LaradocsToolkit: Reusable AI Tools for the Laravel AI SDKSubscriptionify: Feature-Based Subscription Management for LaravelFilament Storage Monitor: Track Disk Usage From Your Filament DashboardLaraOwl: Self-Hosted Monitoring for Laravel ApplicationsLattice: Describe Inertia UIs in PHPMonitor Laravel Queues, Commands, and Schedulers on Any Driver with VigilancePrivacy Filter: Detect PII in Text from LaravelTutorialsShip AI with Laravel: Give Your AI Agent Live Web Search

Aaron is joined by John & Daniel of Thunk to talk about why you should think like a PM, what they want to see from Solo, trash cans in New York, "footy", and a whole lot more.Sponsored by Laracon AU, Honeybadger, Bento, Vask, and DropInBlog.Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical?  Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.Going to Laracon?  Sign up for the Mostly Technical Pre-Party!(00:00) - Introduction to the Thunk Boys (04:13) - Working on Laravel Forge (09:22) - What does Daniel do? (14:30) - Big week for New York (22:34) - World Cup Social Media (29:13) - Laravel Live (36:33) - AI Code Responsibilities (41:52) - Think Like A PM (51:08) - Do Old Best Practices Still Apply? (58:12) - Daniel's Solo Gripes & Asks (01:20:34) - Tidy (01:24:02) - Where Is Ian? Links:ThunkTalking BusinesslyTightenLaravel ForgeLaravel Live UKLaravel Live JapanLaravel Live DenmarkSoloTidy

When you install a package, you probably skip the source code. But what about the AI skills and CLAUDE.md files you are feeding directly into your agent?In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we discuss whether developers are reading the AI skills they install and why it actually matters.We make the case that unread skills are riskier than unread packages because they quietly shape how your agent thinks and can introduce security vulnerabilities or opinions you would never have agreed to if you had just taken 10 minutes to read them.We also look at the flip side, where reading those skills can make you a better developer, expose you to approaches you did not know existed, and help you guide your agents more intentionally across every project.(00:00) - Do developers actually read package source code (02:19) - Why AI skills are riskier than packages (05:07) - Security risks hiding in unread skill files (09:30) - Reading skills as a learning opportunity (11:49) - Silly bit Want a second set of eyes on the tools and packages your team is trusting? Find out how our code review service can help

In this milestone 10-year anniversary episode of North Meets South, Michael and Jake reflect on a decade of podcasting, from their first awkward recordings and early Laravel community connections to the friendships, conferences, and recurring topics that have shaped the show over nearly 200 episodes. A large part of the episode focuses on Michael's work-in-progress event ticketing platform inspired by the challenges of running Laracon AU. He explains the limitations of existing conference ticketing systems, the difficulties of collecting attendee information for multiple conference-adjacent events, and his vision for a more attendee-centric system that manages profiles, dietary requirements, event registrations, and conference networks across multiple Laravel events. To wrap up, Michael and Jake discuss giving developers direct database access, the security implications of SSH access, database permissions, and Laravel filesystem configuration, including why enabling exception throwing for filesystem operations can help avoid silent failures.Show linksLaracon AULaracon US TicketTailor Transistor Laravel News PodcastNo Plans to Merge Notes on WorkTalking BusinesslyLarabelles LaraProm WalletWalletLaravel filesystem throw on fail

Ian and Aaron discuss why HelpSpot raised prices, what Aaron's building for teams with Solo, the short-lived reign of Fable 5, pros & cons of DJ's, and so much more.Sponsored by Laracon AU, Honeybadger, Bento, Vask, and DropInBlog.Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical?  Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.Going to Laracon?  Sign up for the Mostly Technical Pre-Party!(00:00) - The Great DJ Debate (07:58) - Aaron's Going To Laravel Live UK (14:22) - Ian Raised Prices (27:26) - Teams & New Solo Pricing (42:45) - New Frontiers (56:51) - RIP Fable 5 (01:09:43) - Outro's Sponsorship System Links:"Forever Young"Laravel Live UKHelpSpot PricingRIP Fable 5

Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.Show linksScheduler Attributes and Listener Discovery Control in Laravel 13.12.0Bulk Job Dispatching with Bus::bulk() in Laravel 13.13The PHP Foundation Launches an Ecosystem Security TeamAegis for Laravel: Scaffolding and Validation Helpers for Value ObjectsMalware Blocking and Dependency Policies in Composer 2.10Laracon AU 2026 Announces Full Speaker Lineup, Schedule, and WorkshopsShift + AI = Fully Automated Laravel UpgradesLaravel Cloud Adds Scale-to-Zero and Spending LimitsCommunity Laravel Extension for ZedDetect and Resolve Laravel Schema Drift with MigrAlignLaravel Fluent Validation: An Object-Oriented Rule BuilderManage Subscription Plans and Entitlements in Laravel with Laravel EntitlementsPlaya: Cookie-Based Temporary Players for LaravelTyped Objects for Eloquent with ExpressiveParsel: Parse PDFs, Office Documents, and Images in PHPIn-Memory Eloquent Models with TruffleAudit Laravel Apps for Security Issues with CheckpointAdvanced Eloquent Query Filtering with FilterableScheduler List: A Web Dashboard for Laravel's Scheduled TasksGenerate Short, URL-Safe IDs From Numbers With SqidsTutorials

PHP Podcast – June 11, 2026 Guest Hosts: Sara Golemon, Elizabeth Barron & Holly Schilling Eric and John are out this week — Sara, Elizabeth, and Holly take over. Here’s what they covered: PHPVerse Recap PHPVerse just wrapped up, and Elizabeth was there in Amsterdam. The format is unusual — all speakers are flown to one location, but the audience is entirely virtual. It was a class act: professional TV crew, studio lighting, and a makeup and hair team on site. Around 2,500–3,000 people watched the live stream. Everything was broadcast as one long block; individual talk segments and possibly the documentary trailer will be cut and released separately. The full stream is available now — the PHP documentary trailer (produced by Jet Breeze, covering 30+ years of PHP history) appears around the 2:24:30 mark. PHP Foundation 2026 Strategy Document Elizabeth and the PHP Foundation released their 2026 strategy document the same day as this recording. The foundation gathered community input across numerous conversations and conferences, synthesized it into findings, and has now published a plan for the rest of the year. Key themes: repositioning PHP’s public perception (which Elizabeth calls a solvable problem), creating six special interest groups, and launching an Onboarding Initiative to build a real on-ramp for new PHP developers. Elizabeth’s view is that the two things giving her the most hope for PHP’s future are the passion and expertise of the community, and how good the language itself has gotten. Visit thephp.foundation to read the full document. The Onboarding Initiative One of the six special interest groups the foundation is launching is specifically focused on bringing new developers into PHP. Goals include creating a true learning path (not just a reference manual that assumes existing knowledge), improving educational resources, and potentially working with the php.net website to improve the first-time experience. Holly made the point that PHP’s barrier to entry is genuinely lower than almost any other language — the Hello World program is 11 characters — but that story isn’t being told outside the PHP bubble. New developers are turning to JavaScript as a first language and running into minified spaghetti instead of something approachable. AI Writing PHP — And PHP as a Second Language Holly built the entire PHP Tek conference app backend in Laravel without writing a single line of code herself — AI-generated throughout, which she reviewed and approved. The code held up to peer review at the conference with only minor style nits. She ran it on PHP 8.3 and used modern standards throughout (one piece of feedback: stop using empty()). The consensus: AI models write good modern PHP because of the vast amount of open source PHP they were trained on. The caveat Sara raised is worth thinking about — how much of that training data is PHP 4-era code and WordPress 3 repositories? Either way, Holly’s case for PHP as a second language is strong: low ceremony, low boilerplate, readable syntax, and it’s a language where you can do something useful in minutes. PHP’s Reputation Problem (and Why It’s Fixable) The group dug into PHP’s perception gap — the mismatch between how good the language actually is and how it’s perceived outside the community. Holly’s experience as a mobile developer who recommends PHP to others: the pushback is immediate (“isn’t that slow?”, “isn’t that dead?”). The benchmarks don’t support that reputation — PHP outperforms Python on most comparable workloads — but data alone doesn’t shift perception. Elizabeth’s point is that this is primarily a storytelling and coordination problem, not a language problem, and that the foundation’s repositioning work is exactly aimed at closing that gap. The community has the passion. It just needs to tell the story outside its own bubble. PHP Polling API RFC Sara walked through the RFC for a new Polling API in PHP (wiki.php.net/rfc/poll_API). The short version: PHP currently has five or six different ways to do I/O multiplexing (watching multiple streams and acting on whichever one is ready first), and which one works depends on the OS, available extensions, and PHP version. The Polling API proposal creates a single, unified interface that abstracts all of that. The immediate beneficiaries are async frameworks like Amp PHP, ReactPHP, and Revolt, which currently have to maintain multiple backend implementations to cover different environments. The bigger picture: this is a building block on the path toward true async PHP, likely contributing to something more complete in PHP 9.0. Most app developers won’t use it directly — but the libraries they depend on will. RFCs are all listed at wiki.php.net/rfc. PHP.net: Do As We Say, Not As We Do Sara, who has contributed to php.net, copped to the state of the codebase: some of it dates to the PHP 3 era, there are functions.inc files, and it is very much “do as we say, not as we do.” The historical reason is that php.net used to rely on community-administered mirrors (r-synced servers running everything from PHP 5.1 to 5.6 simultaneously), so modernizing the code was impossible without controlling the runtime. That’s changed with CDN-based load balancing — they can now control what PHP version runs on php.net — and the code has been getting better. But it’s a slow process. PHP Podcasts Past, Present, and Future Holly asked about the PHP Town Hall podcast (Ben Edmonds and Phil Sturgeon), and the group did a quick tour of PHP podcast history. The PHP Roundtable — originally started by Sammy, taken over by Eric — has produced about three episodes. Sara and producer Joe are planning to take it off Eric’s hands and actually do it properly. And Elizabeth announced that the PHP Foundation is launching a new podcast: tentatively called PHP at Scale, hosted by Ben Marx, focused on telling the stories of organizations pushing PHP to its limits. No launch date yet, but there’s already a queue of interested guests. Next Week’s Show — Moved to Wednesday Sara will be on a boat off the coast of Galicia on Thursday, so next week’s episode is moving to Wednesday. Guests will include Paul Reinheimer and (hopefully) Sean Coase — two veterans from PHP’s podcasting past. Elizabeth is going to try to make it work around the Canadian Grand Prix. Mac Mini M4 for Local LLMs Holly picked up a refurbished Mac Mini M4 (16GB RAM, 512GB storage) specifically to run LLM models locally via Ollama. Apple Silicon is a solid choice for this because the unified memory architecture gives the neural cores access to far more RAM than a discrete GPU setup. Sara is waiting for the M5, which is reportedly not coming until fall — and is already resigned to spending too much on it when it lands. Links from the show: PHP Foundation — 2026 Strategy Document PHP RFC: Polling API PHP RFC Wiki — All RFCs Under Discussion Amp PHP — Async framework ReactPHP — Event-driven async PHP Revolt — Event loop for PHP php.net website source code (github.com/php/web-php) PHP Architect Discord Guest Hosts: Sara Golemon Based in Lisbon, Portugal PHP core contributor; code contributor via the Curl project (which means she technically has code on Mars) Elizabeth Barron Executive Director, PHP Foundation Based in Germany Holly Schilling Primary mobile developer; built the PHP Tek 2026 conference app Based near Chicago, IL Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ PHPScore Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Note: Next week’s show is on Wednesday (not Thursday) with guests Paul Reinheimer and Sean Coase. Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.11 appeared first on PHP Architect.

Ian and Aaron discuss hiring new employees, Ian claiming he's over AI coding, huge updates to Outro, going big or going home on Token Town, and more.Sponsored by Laracon AU, Honeybadger, Bento, Vask, and DropInBlog.Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical?  Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.Going to Laracon?  Sign up for the Mostly Technical Pre-Party!(00:00) - Down to the River (05:33) - Ian's Over AI Coding?! (13:45) - Aaron's Employee's First Week (21:42) - Marketing & Content (27:27) - Ian's Been Busy With Outro (37:41) - Slash Brag Update (41:06) - Ian Finally Hired Somebody! (47:00) - Token Town Update (55:28) - Horse Business (01:04:14) - Aaron Went Fishing (01:13:16) - Kids Sports Links:Texas Hill CountryToken Town w/ Josh PigfordKristen FoxenSEP IRACorey Haines Marketing Skills on GitHubBlockNoteIan's tweet about AI & coding fasterJoe Masilotti's post about deleting WebSockets

Have you ever added a method to an enum and then wondered if you just turned it into something it was never meant to be?In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we discuss where to draw the line when adding methods and logic to PHP enums.We trace the evolution from magic strings to constants to interfaces, and explain why enums were the missing piece PHP needed all along.We also cover when label methods and data structure helpers belong on an enum, why Eloquent queries cross a line, and how to avoid turning a simple enum into a bloated helper class.(00:00) - Why magic strings and constants fall short (01:43) - How PHP enums replaced interface constants (02:26) - What methods belong on an enum (06:58) - The rule for keeping enum methods focused (10:44) - Silly bit Join developers who think carefully about clean code decisions in the No Compromises community. 

PHP Podcast – June 4, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered: PHP Tek 2027 — New Dates, Bold New Format Mark your calendars: PHP Tek 2027 is happening April 27–29 in Chicago, and Eric and John are shaking things up. Rather than a straight three-day PHP conference, next year gets three tracks — two of which are familiar PHP-focused content, and a third specialty track that rotates each day: one day of JavaScript, one day of DevOps, and one day of Laravel. The Laravel track is specifically focused on how developers actually use the framework day-to-day, not a product pitch. Single-day passes will be available, so if you’re only coming for the DevOps or JS day, you’re covered. One important heads-up: there’s a big convention happening at a venue nearby in Rosemont, so the hotel block could sell out faster than usual. When they open reservations, don’t wait. Holly the Elephant Is Going Fast The PHP Architect conference elephant, named Holly, is now available at store.phparch.com, and demand has been remarkable. Eric woke up one morning to a flood of orders and genuinely couldn’t figure out what happened. The warning from last year applies here: people said they’d grab Tony later, and now Tony is gone forever. Holly ships June 17th for most orders, but if you’ve already ordered, it’s likely on its way. Get yours while you can. PHP Tek TV Is Doing Something Different This Year In past years, conference talk videos would get edited and uploaded weeks (or months) after the event. This year, John is doing things differently: the raw, unedited recordings are going up now, with timestamps in the description so you can jump straight to specific talks — some rooms recorded a seven-hour continuous feed and just left it running. The clean edited versions are still coming (a video editor friend in the UK is on it), but if you want to see a talk right now, the raw version is there. Audio quality varies by room, but it’s watchable. Immich — A Self-Hosted Google Photos That Actually Works John has been running Immich, a self-hosted photo management platform, in a Docker container for about a month and loves it. It does facial recognition, GPS tagging, and auto-uploads from his phone — essentially everything he cares about in Google Photos, without handing his photos to Google or Apple. He’s now planning to use it as the PHP Architect conference photo library, centralizing all the Tech photos in one browsable, shareable place. It’s fully open source, with no licensing cost, and an optional donation tier. If you’re sick of paying ever-increasing storage bills to big tech companies, this is worth a look. Ben Ramsey’s PHP Tek Homecoming Article Is Free to Read The May issue of PHP Architect magazine is now available to digital subscribers, and this month’s free article is Ben Ramsey’s piece on the PHP Tek homecoming experience. Eric reached out to Ben last minute and he delivered. If you’ve never subscribed, this is a low-barrier way to see what the magazine is like. Head to phparch.com, grab the free article, and if you like what you see, subscriptions are not expensive. John Is Resurrecting a Legacy Laravel App — With Claude’s Help John has been grinding away on a Laravel 6 app that was a passion project years ago and has now been revived as an actual client project. Using Claude to methodically baby-step through each version upgrade — starting with writing tests to establish a baseline — he’s worked up through the major Laravel versions. The turning point came when he hit the version where the old event sourcing package (Prooph) was clearly on its way out, and the decision was made to migrate to Verbs, Nuno Maduro’s Laravel-native event sourcing package. John’s now looking forward to it. He’s also accidentally been burning tokens on the company Anthropic account (not his personal account), which Eric caught live on air. They are going to talk about it after the show. Eric’s Mystery Side Project Is Almost Ready — If DNS Would Cooperate Eric teased a new side project last week and intended to reveal it this week, but he’s stuck waiting on DNS propagation. The domain was registered with DigitalOcean DNS already in use by a previous owner, so Eric moved it to Cloudflare — only to discover there may be a conflict because the previous owner was also on Cloudflare. The result: the name servers are stuck on old values. John’s live suggestion was to move it to Route 53, and Eric was immediately sold. The project is almost ready to show the world, DNS gods willing. Meta’s AI Support Bot Got Socially Engineered Eric shared a video demonstrating how someone prompt-injected Meta’s AI customer support bot into sending a verification code to an attacker-controlled email address — and then using that code to add the email to an account, enabling a full password reset and account takeover. The irony: Meta is the company behind Llama and has some of the deepest AI expertise on the planet, and they still shipped a support bot with permissions it shouldn’t have. Eric’s point was pointed: you can fire a human employee who gets social engineered, which creates accountability throughout the team. An AI has no such incentive structure. Crowbarring AI into account-modification workflows without appropriate guardrails is just asking for this. The PHP Foundation Now Publishes Board Meeting Minutes Eric discovered that the PHP Foundation has started publishing their board meeting minutes in a public GitHub repository. Nothing earth-shattering yet, but seeing who attended, what was discussed, and what decisions are being made gives the community a real window into how the foundation operates at scale. It also helps explain something Eric and John have always found interesting: why PHP stalled so hard between versions 5 and 7. There was no foundation, no financial backing, just volunteer hours. Now there’s a paid staff and governance structure — and the minutes show exactly how complex running something at PHP’s scale actually is. The PHP Foundation Has a Dedicated Security Team Now Speaking of the Foundation, it now has a dedicated security team — a sign of how seriously the supply chain attack problem has gotten. AI tools are being deployed by black hat actors to find vulnerabilities in open source projects at a scale that wasn’t possible before. PHP is not just another open source project; it underpins a massive slice of the web, and companies depend on it staying secure. Having a team specifically focused on this is the right call, even if it’s a sobering reminder of where the threat landscape is heading. Moat — Nuno’s GitHub Security Auditing Tool Nuno Maduro (of Laravel fame) quietly shipped a tool called Moat that audits your GitHub presence for security gaps. Install it globally via Brew or Composer, point it at your GitHub org, a specific repo, or even a specific branch, and it gives you a report on where your security posture could be improved. It’s read-only — it won’t change anything — and it’s explicit that it is not a security certification. Eric wants to use it to audit the PHP Architect organization’s repos, many of which haven’t been touched in years. Think of it as a fast, opinionated triage tool, not a replacement for a real security audit. Links from the show: PHP Tek 2027 — Chicago, April 27–29 PHP Architect Store — Holly the Elephant Immich — Self-Hosted Photo Management PHP Architect Magazine Verbs — Laravel Event Sourcing by Thunk Moat — GitHub Security Auditing by Nuno Maduro PHP Foundation on GitHub PHP Architect Discord Host: Eric Van Johnson X: @shocm Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @eric John Congdon X: @johncongdon Mastodon: @john@phparch.social Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @john Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ PHPScore Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore CodeRabbit Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.06.04 appeared first on PHP Architect.

Michael and Jake are joined by Jason "JMac" McCreary to talk the impact of AI on Laravel Shift and modern upgrade workflows, and his latest Fast Laravel course focused on edge caching and application performance.Jason shares how Laravel Shift has evolved alongside AI-assisted development, why recent Laravel releases have changed the upgrade landscape, and why he still believes there's value in keeping applications aligned with the latest framework conventions rather than simply running composer update. The conversation explores how AI tools are influencing developer workflows, the future of upgrade automation, and new ways Shift is integrating with agentic coding tools. The second half of the episode dives deep into Fast Laravel, Jason's course on making Laravel applications dramatically faster using Cloudflare edge caching. Drawing on decades of web development experience, he explains why page caching remains one of the most effective performance techniques available, how Laravel's default stateful behaviour can prevent effective caching, and the practical steps required to achieve cache rates approaching 99% on real-world applications.Show LinksLaravel ShiftShift AI SkillsFast LaravelSeparate `static` middlewareManaged queues on Laravel CloudLaravel Cloud

Ian and Aaron discuss Aaron's new employee, the latest on Outro, a surprise trip to Portland, and more.Sponsored by Laracon AU, Honeybadger, Bento, Vask, and DropInBlog.Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical?  Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.Going to Laracon?  Sign up for the Mostly Technical Pre-Party!(00:00) - Where Was Ian? (02:26) - Outro Update (12:32) - Kelsey Is Gone (22:11) - Is Cloudflare Up? (24:53) - Aaron's New Employee (40:10) - LaraProm Update (42:14) - A Little Technical (54:35) - Aaron Went To Portland (01:06:35) - Slash Brag Links:Brett AdcockManaged Queues on Laravel CloudOutro.fmTinySeedJason LengstorfWeb Dev ChallengeKelsey Hightower

Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.Show linksGenerate HTML Password Rules Attribute in Laravel 13.9.0Storage Cache Store in Laravel 13.10.0Scrollbar Styling and Container Size Utilities in Tailwind CSS v4.3.0Laravel Introduces First-Party Passkey Authentication SupportLaravel's AI SDK adds sub-agentsDHH Joins Laravel Live Denmark 2026 for Fireside Chat with Taylor OtwellManage Laravel Cloud Deployments Inside PhpStormMoat: A Security Review for Your GitHub AccountModel-Based Scheduling for Laravel with CadenceLarapanda: A Type-Safe Lightpanda Browser SDK for LaravelUse a Google Sheet as Your Laravel Database with the Google Sheets Database DriverDrag-and-Drop Sorting for Eloquent Models with Reorderable for LaravelPiper: Laravel-Style Array and String Helpers for PHP's Pipe OperatorSimple Feature Flags for Laravel with Laravel ToggleLaravel Paper: A Flat-File Eloquent DriverTutorialsLaravel MongoDB Full-Text Search tutorial: The Art of the RelevancyShip AI with Laravel: Real-Time Streaming Chat UI with Livewire

Microsoft Access VBA https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Microsoft%20Access%20VBA/33012 An Example of Stack String in High Level Language https://isc.sans.edu/diary/An%20Example%20of%20Stack%20String%20in%20High%20Level%20Language/33008 Cross-Platform NPM Stealer https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Cross-Platform%20NPM%20Stealer/33006 Laravel Lang Compromised with RCE Backdoor Across https://socket.dev/blog/laravel-lang-compromise Google API keys keep working after you delete them https://www.aikido.dev/blog/google-api-keys-deletion

Aaron is joined this week by Jesse Hanley, founder of Bento, to talk about building a seven figure business, why he feels less stress now than he did when he started, migrating from Heroku to Planetscale, and more.Sponsored by InterNACHI, Honeybadger, Bento, Vask, and NativePHP UltraInterested in sponsoring Mostly Technical?  Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.Going to Laracon?  Sign up for the Mostly Technical Pre-Party!(00:00) - 5 TB of Data (11:12) - Laravel Live Japan (15:46) - Seven Figure Business (24:32) - Advice for Indie Hackers (28:57) - Pick Better Problems (32:50) - Friends of Bento (42:33) - Heroku to Planetscale (01:15:02) - What's Next Links:Jesse HanleySpeedshopJesse's Database School episodeTatamiDragonflyRedisShakeLaravel Live JapanDaniel Coulbourne

Have you ever opened a file to make a quick change, only to find dozens of lines of commented-out code making it nearly impossible to understand what's actually running?In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we discuss why keeping dead code around is slowing your whole team down.We make the case that commented-out or unused code creates real confusion when searching a codebase, whether you are a new developer, a consultant, or even an AI agent trying to understand what is actually in use.We also cover why Git is all the safety net you need, how Git bisect can recover deleted code you thought you might need someday, and why the fear of deleting code is almost always unfounded.(00:00) - Why commented-out code slows everyone down (02:03) - How dead code creates false search results (05:10) - Dead code costs you more with AI agents too (05:55) - How Git bisect helps you recover deleted code (10:08) - When commenting out code is actually fine (11:45) - Silly bit Join the conversation and share how your team handles dead code in our No Compromises community

Michael shares a behind-the-scenes look at organising Laracon AU 2026, including the new committee-based CFP review process, the tooling built to manage the talk submissions, and how AI-assisted workflows helped shape the final conference schedule. The conversation dives into balancing technical depth with audience engagement, designing conference cadence to avoid cognitive overload, and why advanced technical talks are so difficult to execute well.Jake and Michael also discuss the realities of crafting technical presentations, from simplifying code examples and avoiding "proof of expertise" syndrome, to using AI tools as collaborative thought partners when preparing talks. Along the way, they explore how conference organisers think about audience fit, production experience, practical takeaways, and keeping attendees engaged during deeply technical sessions.Show linksLaracon AUModel Context Protocol (MCP)Riff & Refine: Trust the Process

Ian and Aaron discuss finally recording Token Town, Ian finally shipping Outro, the benefits of working in public, what's coming next to Solo, and more.Sponsored by InterNACHI, Honeybadger, Bento, Vask, and NativePHP UltraInterested in sponsoring Mostly Technical?  Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.Going to Laracon?  Sign up for the Mostly Technical Pre-Party!(00:00) - We Finally Recorded Token Town (07:43) - Outro Is Live! (21:43) - Working In Public Is Required (27:54) - What's Next For Outro (30:22) - What's New With Solo (43:59) - Free vs. Paid (55:20) - First Actual Resume (01:04:41) - Starting A Movement (01:12:36) - Everybody Loves Discord Links:Token TownOutroSyntaxSoloFasterAaron's page for TupleDerek Sivers's "Now" page

In the first-ever episode of Token Town Aaron & Ian break down pricing changes for Claude -p and the Agent SDK, a temporary 50% increase to Claude's limits, leaps in hacking ability, and more.Sponsored by Bento.Links:Claude pricing changes'Anthropic beats OpenAI on business adoption'Claude Code weekly limits are 50% higherSoloAmpSuperpowersMythos & cybersecurity

Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.Show linksInterruptible Jobs in Laravel 13.7.0Queue-Wide Inspection Methods in Laravel 13.8.0Laravel Installer Now Returns JSON When Running Inside an AI AgentPolyscope for Windows is Now AvailableA Free Shift to Check If Your App is Ready for Laravel CloudRedBerry to Host Georgia's First Laravel Meetup in TbilisiLaravel Schema Sentinel: Detect and Fix Database Schema DriftLaravel Idempotency: HTTP Idempotency Middleware for LaravelLaravel Web Push NotificationsChevere Workflow: A Declarative PHP Workflow Engine with Async Job ExecutionLaravel Shopper: A Headless E-Commerce Admin Panel for LaravelLaravel Brain: Visualize Your Application's Request LifecycleVerifiable Audit Logging with Laravel ChronicleLaravel ClickHouse: A Full-Featured ClickHouse Driver for LaravelGenerate Livewire Skeleton Placeholders Automatically with WirebonesAttach Addresses to Any Eloquent Model with Laravel AddressableTutorialsPersonalized Content Delivery System: Building an AI-powered recommendation engine with Laravel and MongoDBShip AI with Laravel: Search Entire PDFs with Zero Search Logic

Ian and Aaron talk about what's cooking with Solo, why Aaron's hiring his first full-time employee, Ian's frustrations with moving the team to Codex, and a feel good AI story.Sponsored by InterNACHI, Honeybadger, Bento, Vask, and NativePHP UltraInterested in sponsoring Mostly Technical?  Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.Going to Laracon?  Sign up for the Mostly Technical Pre-Party!(00:00) - Follow Up (04:20) - Solo Update (11:52) - Business Dad Pushback (19:15) - Raising Money (24:39) - Aaron's First Full-Time Employee (31:30) - Ian's Hiring Troubles (39:26) - A Laravel New

PHP Podcast – May 7, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered: PHP Tek Is 11 Days Away — And Everyone Is Stressed The conference countdown is real: 11 days, 10 hours, and a handful of seconds on the clock. John’s travel plans hinge entirely on little league baseball — if his team wins their Tuesday playoff game, he coaches the Saturday game, then bolts for the airport. If they lose Tuesday, he’s sad but gets to Chicago earlier. Meanwhile, Eric is grinding through the PHP Tek TV redesign, trying to wire up the SessionIze API for schedule imports instead of doing it all manually from a CSV, and sending the design team a novel’s worth of badge and signage requests. Holly’s conference app now has notifications working: select a talk, and if Eric or John move it around, you’ll get pinged. Keynote and lunch notifications are also on the table for attendees who can never find the room. Conference Stress Dreams: The Motorcycle Gunman Edition John woke up mid-dream to his wife opening the blinds for the school run — and the dream he was pulled from was genuinely unhinged. He was in an Uber waiting for Uber Eats to arrive at an intersection when a motorcyclist pulled up behind them, got off, shot out the tire, then came to John’s door and started shooting at the lock to get in. The Uber app had briefly flashed the word “threat” on the map. John laid the seat back as far as it would go. The driver just stood there. Then the blinds opened and it was just a Thursday morning. John’s verdict: it’s conference stress. Hard to argue with that. JS Tek — An Honest Conversation John decided to say the quiet part out loud: JS Tek hasn’t brought in the JavaScript community the way they hoped. The PHP world is unusual in paying for speaker travel and hotel rooms; Joe in Discord confirmed this barely happens outside PHP, and somebody speaking at a Ruby/Rails conference once told Eric they not only weren’t reimbursed for travel — they had to buy their own conference ticket. Eric’s takeaway: the JS track itself is a great idea for PHP developers, but trying to recruit an entirely new community into the fold didn’t work out. Next year’s structure will probably look different. The PHP 7-to-8 Upgrade That Failed Three Times Eric’s consulting team has been struggling with a client upgrade from PHP 7 to 8 — unusual, because they’ve done this many times and know the pitfalls. After three failed attempts, a deep dive revealed the culprit: an abandoned Laravel Shift branch left behind by a previous developer who had started an upgrade and walked away, with missing config files baked right into the inherited codebase. The fix wasn’t just another attempt — it was getting the management team to produce a proper testing playbook, and more importantly, actually getting trained on the application. The team had been fixing bugs in code they’d never seen working correctly. Today they finally got that training session, and Eric says the excitement and “ah-ha” moments from his developers made it clear this should have happened much sooner. The Database on the Same Server Problem A related discovery from the same client: the database lives on the same machine as the application. Every upgrade means shutting the app down, exporting the database, migrating it somewhere else, and starting over. Eric’s head doesn’t compute why this is still the case in 2026. Even a second machine designated as a database server would be a massive improvement. In a moment of uncomfortable honesty, Eric also admitted that PHP Architect’s own conference site has the same setup — Forge makes it so easy to throw a database on the same box that you just don’t think about it, until you do. Laravel Shift, Laravel Cloud, and the Pre-Check Tool The conversation circled back to Laravel Shift — JMAC’s automated upgrade tool — which Eric notes has become less essential as Laravel’s upgrade paths have smoothed out considerably compared to the wild west of early Laravel development. But Shift is still out there and still useful. More interestingly, JMAC has a new free Shift specifically for Laravel Cloud readiness: run it against your app and it’ll tell you whether your application is compatible with Laravel Cloud’s serverless model, flag any system commands that won’t be available, and help you understand what services you’d need. Laravel Cloud itself is Taylor’s “don’t worry about servers” deployment platform, and if you’re not a sysops person, having a Shift that holds your hand through the setup could be the difference between trying it and not. PHP Internals Made Readable — Externals and PHP RFC Watch Eric plugged two tools for following what’s happening in PHP core. The first is externals.io — a much more readable front-end for the PHP internals mailing list, with search, read-tracking, and threaded discussions. The second is a newer discovery: php-rfc.watch, which focuses purely on RFCs, showing what’s active, what’s been voted on, and how the votes broke down. It’s more of a quick-glance dashboard than a full discussion forum. Eric also highlighted a specific RFC from Ben Ramsey: a proposal to update the PHP license, accompanied by a detailed blog post called “PHP License Simplified” that walks through the history and rationale. If you’ve ever been curious about why license choice matters (especially at the enterprise level where legal teams block open source based on license type), Ben’s post is worth the read. NeoVim’s Flash Plugin — Used Wrong for Years Eric has been using Flash.nvim, a NeoVim navigation plugin, for years. He recently discovered he had been using it completely incorrectly the entire time. He thought he understood what it did. He did not. A YouTube video explaining the plugin properly (titled something like “How to Jump Anywhere Instantly in NeoVim”) revealed that what he’d been doing was essentially pressing the wrong keybinding and stumbling through a fraction of the plugin’s actual functionality. This sent the conversation into a longer Vim origin story: Eric learned Vim because he was flying around the country installing Cyborg firewalls on remote servers and Vi was just there. John picked it up at an enterprise job and never thought about alternatives until he saw a developer using MacVim to write Rails and had his mind blown. The core message: you can use a tool for decades and still be using it wrong, and that’s okay — but watch the tutorial. Eric Doesn’t Know How Old He Is Eric has been confidently telling people for a full year that he’s 55. His wife Bek has known for some time that this is not correct. The moment of reckoning came when Eric asked Alexa: “If I was born in 1969, how old would I be now?” Alexa hedged on the birthday thing but confirmed the range. Bek stepped in. Alexa, a full 30-60 seconds later, stepped back in and confirmed: “Your birthday’s May 8th, you’re turning 57.” Eric is apparently going directly from 55 to 57, having skipped 56 entirely. He also noted at the Padres game with his wife that their Costco membership is older than a 13-year-old kid they saw on the Jumbotron, and that it could legally babysit him. John is turning 50 this year. Everyone is fine. Links from the show: externals.io — PHP Internals Discussion Reader PHP RFC Watch — Track Active PHP RFCs Ben Ramsey: PHP License Simplified Laravel Shift — Automated Laravel Upgrade Tool Laravel Cloud How to Jump Anywhere Instantly in NeoVim (Flash.nvim Tutorial) PHP Tek 2026 — Chicago PHP Architect Store PHP Architect Discord Host: Eric Van Johnson X: @shocm Mastodon: @eric@phparch.social Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @eric John Congdon X: @johncongdon Mastodon: @john@phparch.social Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @john Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ PHPScore Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore CodeRabbit Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post The PHP Podcast 2026.05.07 appeared first on PHP Architect.

In this episode, Michael shares details from a major internal platform shift at work, including the decision to completely remove an underused public JSON API and rebuild integrations around real customer needs instead of hypothetical use cases. The conversation dives deep into Laravel Passport, Sanctum, OAuth flows, request authorisation, and some tricky edge cases around testing authenticated APIs.Jake then broadens the conversation into AI infrastructure, local model hosting, security implications of autonomous AI systems, NVIDIA hardware demand, and the future potential of photonic processors as a solution to the growing power and cooling bottlenecks facing AI workloads.Show linksLaravel PassportLaravel SanctumLaravel Passport actingAs testing helpersPHP enumsPHPStanLarastanZapierClaudeNVIDIA DGX systemsPhotonic processors

Ian and Aaron discuss the most harrowing experience of Aaron's life (complete with the funniest ad transition in Mostly Technical history), talk about Ian's trip to the Laravel Roadshow in NYC, and dive into what's cooking with Solo.Sponsored by InterNACHI, Honeybadger, Bento, Vask, and NativePHP UltraInterested in sponsoring Mostly Technical?  Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.Going to Laracon?  Sign up for the Mostly Technical Pre-Party!(00:00) - The Birthday Party Incident (10:45) - He Starts Doing The Slip & Slide (21:01) - The Stuff of Legends (26:57) - More Kids = More Productive? (32:58) - Solo Is A Meta Harness (48:13) - It's Video Week! (55:06) - Laravel Roadshow Links:Native PHP: The VibesSoloSoak TestingFasterVehiklLaravel Roadshow: Dallas

Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.Show linksDebounceable Queued Jobs in Laravel 13.6.0Redis Cluster Support for Queues in Laravel 13.5.0Flaky Test Retries in Pest v4.5.0Time-Based Sharding in Pest v4.6.0Composer 2.9.6 Fixes Two Perforce Command Injection VulnerabilitiesAttach PDFs Directly to Mailables in laravel-pdf 2.6.0Spatie Shares Their Coding Guidelines as AI SkillsLaravel API Starter Kits Are Coming Soon!LLPhant: A PHP Generative AI Framework Inspired by LangChainPHPverse 2026 Returns June 9thAI Generative Engine Optimization for LaravelGenerate, Parse, and Convert Documents in PHP with PaperdocAn Opinionated Agent Skill for Building REST APIs in LaravelLaravel Mobile Pass: Generate Apple Wallet and Google Wallet PassesLaravel SluggableTutorialsBuild Custom Middleware for Query Performance Monitoring and Optimization in Laravel with MongoDBShip AI with Laravel: Your AI Agent Has Amnesia. Let's Fix It.Ship AI with Laravel: RAG with Embeddings and pgvector in Laravel 13

Michael and Jake are joined by David Hemphill to discuss David's macOS app Gent, a task runner built on the "Ralph loop" pattern for AI-powered coding workflows.The conversation covers how Gent takes a project requirements document (PRD), breaks it into small tasks that fit within a single context window, and runs them sequentially or in parallel using copy-on-write clones and Git worktrees.We discuss our own evolving workflows with Claude Code, including plan mode, the "Grill Me" skill for stress-testing plans, managing context windows, and the /rewind command.Show LinksDavid HemphillGentRalph loopConductorPolyscopeChief"Grill Me" skillMatt Pocock / AI HeroSoloThe Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate ProgrammersLaracon

Vite just launched Void, a fullstack JavaScript framework and cloud platform that bundles together routing, SSR, auth, an ORM, and nearly everything you'd expect from a modern meta-framework — all built on top of Cloudflare's infrastructure. Scott, Wes, and CJ dig into whether Void is the Rails moment JavaScript has been waiting for, or just shiny Cloudflare lock-in with a bow on it. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! The Announcement 00:27 Laravel or Rails for JavaScript? 01:38 What is this big announcement? 04:36 It's just Vercel for Cloudflare? 07:09 Database options. 09:37 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 10:01 Type safety. 12:09 What about RPC? 15:41 Component Loaders over Page Loaders. 18:23 Baked in authentication via Better Auth. 22:57 Lock-in. Unapologetically Cloudflare Evan's X Post. 24:55 Is it lock-in? 32:40 Self-Cloudflare your own Void apps? Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads