php[podcast] episodes from php[architect]

PHP Podcast – October 1, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling

It’s John’s birthday, so naturally he skipped. The PHP Foundation is hiring, 8.6 picks up a surprise RC, and the crew goes deep on ABI promises, deprecation pile-ups, generics, and a childhood firefighter who’s still “a hit.”

John’s Birthday and the PHP Foundation’s Hiring Call

The episode kicks off with Joe, Sara, and Holly holding down the fort while Eric and John are out — John, as it happens, because it’s his birthday. The crew gleefully encourages everyone in Discord to ping John and wish him a happy birthday (and harass him appropriately), noting that John and Eric were the ones who scheduled the show for the first of the month in the first place.

From the celebratory ribbing, Joe pivots to real news: the PHP Foundation has opened its 2027 contractor applications. He walks through what they’re actually looking for — contributors who can read and write C, not just PHP, with experience writing extensions, participating on the internals mailing list, and contributing to open source. The work centers on filling gaps around security, reviewing pull requests, and keeping the language healthy.

Holly jokes she’d be the first person fired from the Foundation, and Sara dryly notes that someone has to be first. It’s a warm, self-deprecating opening that sets the tone for a technically dense but very loose episode.

PHP 8.6: The Mistag, the Extra RC, and the Release Schedule

Joe explains that it has been an unusually slow PHP news week, with most contributors heads-down on 8.6. He admits the team completely forgot to toot the recent release versions on Mastodon — which was notable because one of them was a security release, so listeners should update their PHP versions if they haven’t already.

The bigger story is a tagging bug. When branching 8.6 off master into its own branch at the RC1 milestone, the automation (a Docker-based release toolchain descended from scripts Sara once maintained and Mateo later upgraded) mistagged something. The fix was simply bumping to RC2, which means 8.6 now gets five RCs instead of the planned four, since RC1 and RC2 landed in the same week. Barring any game-breaking bugs, RC5 lands November 5th and general release is targeted for November 19th — conveniently dodging US Thanksgiving week.

Joe shares how much he’s learned stepping into the release manager role alongside Mateo, especially around ABI compatibility and backwards-incompatibility decisions. Sara confirms that PHP’s long-standing promise lives in the minor version number: as long as that middle number stays fixed, APIs can be added but never removed or changed from, say, a macro to a function pointer.

Feature Freezes, Late Deprecations, and the Branch Means Branch Debate

The conversation turns to process frustration. Sara makes her position clear: once a version branches, it’s a feature freeze — and feature freeze means feature freeze. She recounts how she drifted away from release management partly because every cycle brought the same surprise, with people acting shocked that time had passed linearly and that a feature freeze was arriving on schedule.

Joe observes that most of 8.6’s deprecations landed in the beta stage, which felt late to him. With the alphas largely empty of the substance that defines the release, he questions what incentive anyone has to test an alpha that lacks the deprecations and features that matter. He wishes he’d pushed harder to land those changes earlier.

Holly asks the obvious question: why are deprecations so late when the conversation about the next version’s deprecations should already be happening now? Sara offers a theory tied to habits of past release managers doing deprecations in May and June, plus the recurring tendency to dump fifty deprecation votes all at once. Joe confirms this round was among the largest deprecation batches since PHP 7, which Sara attributes partly to people wanting to start the two-phase removal clock as a new major version looms.

Generics, Arrays, and What Makes a Major Version

The hosts debate what would justify PHP 9. Sara argues PHP doesn’t use SemVer, so majors have historically been reserved for big conceptual shifts — annotations/attributes in 8, the engine rewrite in 7, object reference changes in 5, the Zend Engine in 4 — not just features. The current pipeline, in her view, lacks something substantial enough to warrant a nine.

Generics come up as the candidate. Joe thinks generics could eventually bump the version, though not until well after 8.7 ships. Sara wants generics for two reasons: they’re genuinely useful, and they’d finally get people to stop asking for them. Holly draws a firm line: generics should never be retrofitted onto the base array type, which is too strongly optimized to touch.

That spirals into a rich aside on arrays. Holly recounts seeing inexplicable ten-percent performance swings just from recompiling identical code. Sara reveals the awkward truth that “array” isn’t really one type but several hiding behind a shared facade, and that for associative data a plain-old-data class with named properties will be faster than array keys. The group also floats value types, structs, and copy-on-write semantics as worthwhile future directions.

Voice to Vectors: Eric Mann’s Searchable Audio Archive

Joe highlights a short, practical blog post from frequent contributor Eric Mann titled “From Voice to Vectors: Building a Searchable Audio Archive.” The value proposition resonates with anyone at a large company drowning in recorded meetings stashed in S3 — finding the one meeting you missed while on vacation is painful.

The post demonstrates using a handful of PHP extensions to transcribe recordings into text, run them through an LLM for inference, and load the results into a search engine so meetings, company history, and the decisions made in them become genuinely searchable. Joe calls it an awesome use case for the workflow.

Sara immediately riffs on applying it to her own hundreds of gigabytes of raw GoPro footage, using FFmpeg to strip the audio first — mostly so she can read transcripts and figure out which clips are safe to delete without watching hours of video (while carefully preserving the gold, like old footage of her niece and nephew).

Vanilla PHP vs. Framework Identity, and a Trip Down Assembly Lane

A Reddit thread asking whether to learn PHP from scratch or jump straight to a framework prompts a thoughtful segment. Joe favors learning vanilla PHP first — it’s how he learned — but recognizes not everyone learns that way, drawing parallels to the Rails era where developers identified as Rails devs more than Ruby devs, and to WordPress developers who wrote PHP without realizing it.

Sara pushes back gently on the idea that framework identity is new, citing years of Zend Framework devs and others, while agreeing it’s intensifying as ecosystems grow stronger. Both conclude it’s perfectly fine to specialize down to a framework if that fits your business — Joe notes PHP Architect standardizes on Laravel while still maintaining plenty of non-Laravel client code, some predating Laravel entirely. He reminisces about CakePHP being his first framework before Laravel 4 won out on an eleven-year-old hackerspace RFID member-management app that cheerfully ignores SemVer.

The show closes on a nostalgic low-level tangent sparked by a comment about learning pure languages first. Sara recounts learning x86 assembly in high school from a book that included the bytecode, writing her own video driver in Turbo Pascal to enable a 320×200 256-color mode via inline assembly. She and Holly trade register trivia — AX, BX, CX, DX, the accumulator, the X/E/R prefixes for 16/32/64-bit, and the AH/AL byte split — before wrapping with Jurassic Park quotes and calling it an episode.

Links from the show:

PHP Tek 2027 CFP — Submissions close at the end of the month

PHP Tek 2027 — Early bird tickets (April 27–29, Chicago)

PHP Architect Store — Socks, shirts, and swag

PHP Foundation 2027 Contractor Applications

Eric Mann: From Voice to Vectors — Building a Searchable Audio Archive

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

OurCVEs



Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs





CodeRabbit



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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 2026.10.01 appeared first on PHP Architect.

In this episode, Scott talks to Nick Sagona about Pop PHP, a PHP framework that removes the “magic” so your code is easier to understand and maintain.

Links:

Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx

Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt

Nick’s Links:

X – https://x.com/popphpframework

https://www.popphp.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.

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/

#phpc #php #communityCornerPodcast #podcast #phptek

The post Community Corner Podcast: Pop PHP with Nick Sagona appeared first on PHP Architect.

PHP Podcast – September 24, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling

Ian Littman joins the crew to talk PHP community and conferences. Longhorn PHP is three weeks out with a brand new format, the industry keeps shifting under everyone’s feet, and RAM prices remain a personal insult. The hallway track survives it all.

Longhorn PHP, Three Weeks Out and Doing Things Differently

Ian kicked things off with a rundown of this year’s Longhorn PHP, which lands just three weeks after recording at the Aloft Austin Midtown — the same venue the conference has called home since 2021. Thursday is the workshop and tutorial day, this year built around a full-day session on refactoring and cleaning up code, followed by a free-and-open-to-the-public Merge PHP style meetup that evening.

Friday is the main conference day, opening with a keynote from Elizabeth Barron of the PHP Foundation and closing with Eric Mann. In between there are three tracks and fifteen non-keynote talks, plus open spaces later in the day for the topics that didn’t quite make the cut but still deserve a room full of experts to hash them out.

The biggest change: instead of the previous Thursday/Friday/Saturday layout, Longhorn is running as a weekday event. The main conference day is still available as a virtual ticket for anyone who can’t make it to Austin, streamed both live and after the fact — though the tutorial day stays in-person because three-hour hybrid workshops are notoriously hard to get right.

Streaming, Latency, and PHPC.tv

The conversation drifted into how the show and conferences actually reach people. Most listeners consume the podcast as audio weeks or months later, but it also goes out to YouTube, Twitch, and PHPC.tv — a PeerTube instance run by Anne Fellina for the community, where you can watch back catalogs of Merge PHP events and other PHP content without handing your data to Google.

Ian explained how Longhorn and PHP Tech run their streams through MUX rather than YouTube or Twitch, because MUX lets them toggle low-latency streaming. With the venue fully hardwired at gigabit, they can drop latency from thirty seconds down to five or ten, getting remote attendees closer to real time. Joe reminisced about broadcast TV and AM radio football feeds being perfectly in sync back in the day — something modern streaming has, ironically, made worse.

Sara recalled Sean Coates hauling a satellite dish onto a hotel roof back in 2008 just to get a workable stream out of a venue with dial-up-grade internet. The good news is that serving a gigabit of packets no longer requires heroics, and venue connectivity has steadily improved year over year.

A Shifting Industry and the Job Market

The crew dug into the state of tech hiring, riffing on an article claiming nearly 29% of open tech positions had been listed for more than 90 days — the so-called “ghost jobs.” They weighed both sides: some listings really are phantom postings, while others reflect companies that post one description to fish for hundreds of thousands of applicants.

Joe noted that straight-up “PHP developer” roles have largely vanished, replaced by “back-end,” “full stack,” “cloud,” and “forward deployed engineer” titles. Ian pointed out that on smaller teams, full stack is effectively mandatory now, and the real value a developer brings is increasingly about communication — pushing back on vague requirements that even a stack of servers couldn’t guess at.

This naturally spilled into a shared loathing of GraphQL, an aside about SOAP and XPath, and a genuinely grim note on RAM prices. With Samsung doubling a portion of production and rumors of Intel getting back into memory (and maybe even reviving Optane), there was cautious, sarcastic hope that prices might eventually come back down to earth.

The Business of Running a Conference

Ian got candid about the economics of Longhorn. He walked through the conference’s lineage — replacing Lone Star PHP after its seven-year run, launching in 2018 alongside a wave of regional PHP conferences, weathering COVID by rolling deposits forward with a cooperative venue, and navigating scheduling collisions with Laracon and a local application security conference.

The hard numbers were sobering. Attendance dropped roughly 30% going into 2025, landing around 110 in-person attendees in a room built for 150 to 250 — enough to feel empty. The reliable last-minute booking surge that used to push the event from red to black largely failed to materialize, leaving the buffer demolished. Ian is happy to subsidize sponsorship gaps from his own pocket when the room is full, but a downturn in actual attendees is a different signal entirely.

That’s why this year scales back to two days: running a two-day event pencils out to about two-thirds the cost of three, Saturday flights are cheaper for a continental US crowd, and the better-attended days make for fuller rooms — which are simply more fun to speak to. Ticket and sponsorship prices even came down slightly rather than climbing with inflation.

Why the Human Component Still Matters

Ian closed on the thing conferences do that nothing else can: getting people in a room to cut through the noise and share how to build things better. As software output per person grows by leaps and bounds, the value of humans who know what questions to ask — and who can turn a mistake into a shared cautionary tale — has never been higher. Open spaces, borrowed shamelessly from DevOps Days, are his admission that the best conversations won’t always happen from the podium.

Sara made the emotional case plainly: her greatest fear is that in three years we lose the human component of problem solving and sharing our love of it. The hallway track, she insisted, is where it’s always at — you can’t replicate that over Zoom or a YouTube “like and subscribe,” and you certainly can’t get the photo of you stabbing your friend in a Viking helmet five years later.

To lean into that, the schedule intentionally keeps AI to a single tutorial and single talk — everything else is chosen for shelf life, including a PHP 8.6 talk from a release manager (the release lands about a month after the conference) and Elizabeth’s PHP Foundation session. The rest, Ian figures, will show up organically in the hallway track anyway.

Links from the show:

Longhorn PHP — Grab an in-person or virtual ticket

Longhorn PHP Looking back, and looking forward

PHP Tech CFP — Open until the end of October

PHP Architect Swag Store — Yes, they have socks

Join the PHP Architect Discord

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

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.



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 2026.09.24 appeared first on PHP Architect.

PHP Podcast – September 17, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & John Congdon

The September issue shipped 13 days early, a blue elephant named Eric raised eyebrows, PHP 8.6 is racing GTA 6 to a November launch, and a CDN bug taught us all a lesson about cache keys. Also: a lot of World of Warcraft.

The September Issue Ships Early (and the Blue Elephant Situation)

The September issue of PHP Architect went live on the day of recording, roughly 13 days ahead of the usual schedule. Joe credited a flood of feature articles from the community, columnists turning work in early, and editor Jackie’s first pass for keeping the whole company-wide review process ahead of the game. If you’d like to write for the magazine, they pay real cash in American denominations — just head to phparch.com.

Attention quickly turned to the cover, which featured a distinctly blue elephant that the crew agreed had strong “Eric” energy. It came out that this was Jackie’s first attempt at managing the AI-generated cover art, which sparked plenty of teasing about who exactly the human-in-the-loop was. The team also teased upcoming pet shirts and cat socks for the swag store.

PHP Foundation Community Hour Launches

Joe highlighted the brand-new PHP Foundation Community Hour, a podcast produced by PHP Architect and recorded live on the same network as this show. It has its own dedicated RSS feed alongside the usual channels — find it under the podcasts section on the website.

The first episode featured Elizabeth Barron interviewing Matt Stauffer about his blog post on contributing to PHP. Sara praised Matt as a great addition to the Foundation Board, and the crew noted his deep experience getting people to contribute to open source projects, plus his well-known Laravel: Up & Running book. The next episode lands next month with another guest on the theme of contributing to PHP.

The PHP Documentary and 8.6 vs. GTA 6

Sara shared that she finally recorded her interview for the upcoming PHP documentary — filmmaker Jeremy came right to her apartment in Lisbon to shoot it. She’s since seen an hour-long cut and teased that it covers a bit of PHP history, the people involved, and the good and bad choices made along the way. Release timing is still fuzzy, somewhere between one and three months out.

On the release side, Holly noted developer beta 3 is out with the RC approaching, at which point she’ll start pushing her RFCs out for discussion and voting. Joe revealed the general release date: Thursday, November 19th, PHP 8.6.0 — the very same day a small indie title called Grand Theft Auto 6 arrives. The last of the 8.6 deprecations only just merged, so even beta 3 didn’t have everything yet.

The CDN Bug That Cached the Wrong Homepage

Joe walked through a genuinely wild bug on php.net’s new CDN. Bot traffic throwing URL-encoded sequences like %2F, %5C, and %3F caused the CDN to normalize those junk paths down to a single forward slash — and then use that as the cache key, overwriting the homepage cache with 301s, 302s, and 404s. The effect was localized to whichever CDN nodes the bot swarm happened to hit, which made it maddening to reproduce.

Sara pointed out the CDN was actually doing something reasonable in normalizing the path; the real bug was serving a different page than the one you’d get requesting the root. Joe praised the provider’s support team, who confirmed the issue, escalated it to engineering, and validated his mitigation of disabling caching for those status codes. The conversation broadened into how AI crawlers and more sophisticated, high-unique-IP bot traffic are surfacing long-dormant bugs — and the uncomfortable centralization that comes from everyone hiding behind the same few CDN providers.

Foldables, Front-End, and the WoW Detour

Holly kicked off a discussion about Apple’s new foldable device and what it means for front-end design. Her core gripe: mobile screens already lose vertical space to status bars, nav bars, ad bars, and tab bars, so a wider aspect ratio can make things worse. She praised Apple for moving native app navigation off to the side to reclaim vertical space, but noted that does nothing for web pages — which she argues most responsive designs still don’t handle well, especially on 16:9 Android tablets.

Joe weighed in from a consumer angle, worrying about hinge durability on $2,000 foldables and whether they’ll last the three-to-four years he now expects from a phone. Somewhere in between, the show detoured hard into gaming — WoW Classic “Forever,” the November 4th launch, tank builds, and even the naming of shadow priests — before circling back to remind everyone you can, in fact, write MMOs in PHP.

Links from the show:

PHP Architect — September issue now live

PHP Tech 2027 — Early bird tickets (April 27–29, 2027, Chicago)

PHP Tech 2027 CFP — Open until October 31

First PHP Community Hour Podcast

Join the live show on Discord

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

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 2026.09.17 appeared first on PHP Architect.

In this episode, Scott talks with Stanislav Khromov about his project bun-php, which allows PHP to be run through the Bun JavaScript runtime.

Links:

https://github.com/khromov/bun-php/

https://github.com/khromov/bun-wordpress/

https://mochi.fast/

Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx

Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt

Stanislav’s Links:

Website – https://stanislav.garden/

TED Talk – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P11VunN876Q

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.

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/

#phpc #php #communityCornerPodcast #podcast #phptek

The post Community Corner Podcast: bun-php with Stanislav Khromov appeared first on PHP Architect.