php[podcast] episodes from php[architect]

PHP Podcast – August 6, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling

A sick kitten steals the show, Sara loses a fight with her smart lights, PHP 8.6 beta is almost here, and the crew argues about roadmaps, deprecations, and why you shouldn’t be a meat proxy.

Cats, Ice Cream, and Bobbleheads

The episode opened with the usual chaos: Holly’s kitten Rosie made a full appearance, having spent the week battling a chest infection that turned into a sinus and ear infection and threw off her balance. Three vet visits later, Rosie was recovering but very cuddly — and apparently convinced Holly’s headset mic was a cat toy. Sara, catless but armed with ice cream, argued that ice cream beats cats because there’s no poop to clean up.

The conversation spun into merchandise ideas after Eric dropped a photo of a bobblehead in the Discord. The crew riffed on 3D-printing speaker action figures and bobbleheads for the conference, with Holly getting Eric on record that it “would not be expensive” — a statement immediately screenshotted for posterity. Sara and Holly quickly reminded everyone that multicolor prints are their own painful challenge, and someone with Warhammer 40k painting patience would be required.

PHP 8.6 Beta on the Horizon

With 8.6 beta 1 landing a week out, the hosts walked through the highlights from the Stitcher.io “what’s new” write-up. Sara was excited about partial function application finally arriving, though Holly isn’t thrilled with the `…` syntax — but couldn’t propose a better one either. They dug into an earlier, unshipped design that used `$1`/`$2` positional placeholders (similar to Swift), and Joe kept circling back to Python-style named arguments before admitting he wasn’t entirely sure he was describing the right feature.

They also covered read-only property defaults (a natural follow-on to 8.4’s property hooks on interfaces), the new polling API that’s largely future-facing for threading and concurrency work, the new `clamp()` function, and a long-overdue `Duration` class. Holly repeatedly questioned why something like `clamp()` needs to be in the language at all, with Sara conceding the point but noting PHP is a “kitchen sink language” and that ship has sailed. For `Duration`, Sara made the case that it genuinely belongs in core because it’s tied to the timezone knowledge baked into the underlying date/time library.

Deprecations and the Two Populations of PHP

Joe pulled up numbers comparing deprecation RFCs across recent versions — roughly 28 proposals for 8.6, 46 for 8.5, 26 for 8.4, just six for 8.3, and none actually voted on for 8.2 (which Sara guessed lined up with Nikita stepping back to work on LLVM, back when deprecations were called “Nikita’s hit list”). Many of the 8.6 deprecations, organized by Gina P. Banyard, aim to free up words to become reserved keywords in future versions.

The `list()` deprecation came up as a sore spot: Holly would love to see it gone and never uses it in new code, while Joe worries the blast radius across legacy codebases is enormous. That led Sara to articulate the core tension: there are two very different populations of PHP users — the ones aggressively upgrading and adopting new features (the podcast’s audience), and the ones who just want to run their WordPress site without the language shifting under them. Both groups matter, and the language has to push forward without needlessly breaking the second group.

The Roadmap Debate

Building on deprecations, the crew wished aloud that PHP had something resembling a roadmap — not set-in-stone dates, but broad aims like “a feature like X might justify bumping to 9.” Joe suggested borrowing from game dev studios, who publish colorful roadmaps with rough years instead of hard dates and don’t crucify anyone when things slip. Holly noted that even the AI she was workshopping a blog post with warned that PHP internals doesn’t handle the word “roadmap” well and to assume any such proposal will fail.

Sara, invoking her “lawyer’s advice” not to mention it was a recent meeting topic, pointed out the practical wrinkle: the foundation’s paid developers are largely self-directed, and no one is telling them what donors want them to build. Still, everyone agreed a shared set of goals would be valuable. Holly and Sara also gave a shout-out to the unsung, unsexy work — documentation, triage, bug fixing — that keeps the lights on, and to the foundation’s first quarterly progress report for showing what contractors are actually doing.

Longhorn PHP and Travel Logistics

Holly announced her Longhorn PHP talk, “That’s Your Website, Not Your Mobile App,” slotted at 2:30 in Austin on October 15–16. The talk is a venting session about her pet peeve: teams wrapping a Laravel/React/whatever website in a native shell and shipping it as an app without bridging the model differences — regardless of tech stack. She noted it’s her first time at Longhorn, though she recently spoke at a Chicago mobile developers meetup exactly one week shy of ten years after her last appearance there.

The travel talk sprawled into a would-be road-trip convoy (picking up Joe in Memphis, A. Woods from New York, and even attempting to ferry Sara’s car across the ocean), plus a tangent on how absurdly expensive Amtrak is compared to flying — versus Sara’s 20-euro monthly rail pass in Portugal that covers the entire length of the country.

Don’t Be a Meat Proxy

The show closed on Niklas Gruhn’s blog post “Don’t Be a Meat Proxy,” which argues against copy-pasting raw AI output at other humans. Joe described his own workflow: read the AI feedback, condense and distill it, rewrite it, and clearly label anything unvetted (robot emoji included) so teammates know he hasn’t verified it yet. Sara pushed the point harder — if you’re just regurgitating what Claude or Gemini said, the person asking could have done that themselves, so you’re not adding value.

Holly complicated it with real-world nuance: some coworkers ask questions they could’ve answered themselves, then call you rude when you give a condensed answer and keep poking at its edges. The crew acknowledged a whole gradient exists — from “let me Google that for you” territory to genuine “what’s the best way to approach X” conversations that aren’t fact lookups. Sara, self-professed AI hater, admitted the balance has shifted toward “just search it” because AIs are genuinely good at search — with plenty of deep irony noted about machines being good at reading and grokking information humans don’t want to. Bonus: Holly praised naming xAI’s bot “Grok” as genuinely clever.

Links from the show:

PHP Tek 2027 — Early bird tickets and hotel block available

PHP Tek CFP — Open until the end of the month

Longhorn PHP — October 15–16, Austin

What’s new in PHP 8.6 (Stitcher.io)

PHP Foundation’s quarterly report for Q2 2026
Eric’s Laracon 2026 wrap up
PHP Podcast Subscribe Page

Hosts:

Joe Ferguson

Mastodon: @joepferguson@phpc.social

PHPArch.me: @svpernova09

Sara Golemon

Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social

Holly Schilling

Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt

Streams:

Youtube Channel

Twitch

Connect & Hire

PHP Architect Website

Twitter/X

Mastodon

Hire PHP Developers

Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.

Partner

This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners

Displace



Infrastructure Management, Simplified

Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.

https://displace.tech/





OurCVEs

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CodeRabbit



Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.





PHP Architect Consulting



Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor

PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on

https://www.phparch.com/consulting/



Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Join Us Live Next Week

Youtube Channel

Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com

The post The PHP Podcast 2026.08.06 appeared first on PHP Architect.

In this episode, Scott talks with Andrey Kucherenko, creator of jscpd, about why copy-pasted code is an anti-pattern, how jscpd detects duplicate code across dozens of languages, and how the tool has evolved to work inside agentic coding workflows.

Links:

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

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

Andrey’s Links:

jscpd – https://jscpd.dev/

Scott’s Links:

Website – https://scott.keck-warren.com/

Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/scottkeckwarren.bsky.social

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-keck-warren-91689810/

Mastodon – https://phpc.social/@scottkeckwarren

PHP Architect Social Media:

X: https://x.com/phparch

Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com

Discord: https://discord.phparch.com

Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/

Partners

This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners.

Displace

Infrastructure Management, Simplified

Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.

https://displace.tech/

PHPScore

Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore

https://phpscore.com/

CodeRabit

CodeRabbit – Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.

https://www.coderabbit.ai/

Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/

#phpc #php #communityCornerPodcast #podcast #jscpd

The post Community Corner: JSCPD with Andrey Kucherenko appeared first on PHP Architect.

PHP Alive and Kicking – August 4, 2026

Hosts: Chris Miller (standing in solo while Mike is on holiday)

Mike escaped to a beach so Chris hosts alone with special guest Derick Rethans. Expect date-time philosophy, PHP 8.6 goodies, Xdebug secrets, deprecation drama, and a heated debate about how to queue at a pub.

From University Websites to Committing to PHP

Derick traces his PHP origins back to his university days, building websites that needed database connectivity. ASP.NET was an option, but nobody wanted to pay for it — Linux was cool, and PHP was easy to start using. That combination hooked him early.

His very first accepted contribution came from a practical need: everyone wanted centered Shockwave Flash films on their pages, back before CSS even existed. Centering meant knowing the width of a file, and while getimagesize() already existed (and still works today), it didn’t understand Flash. Derick added that support.

From there he fell into bug triage, spending several years working through the issue tracker alongside Jani Taskinen (whose “Sniper” name still shows up in commit logs). For a long time it was just the two of them reproducing and fixing bugs — an important task that gets neglected easily, which is exactly how backlogs of a thousand issues and pull requests build up.

The Eternal Problem of Date and Time

Chris and Derick dig into why date-time bugs are so hard to triage: date algorithms are genuinely complicated, and it takes real time to figure out whether a report is a user’s mistake or an actual PHP bug. Crashes are easy to reproduce; subtle date arithmetic is not.

The core philosophical question is “what does adding a month even mean?” If it’s January 31st and you add a month, PHP historically just bumps the month number, producing February 31st, which overflows to March 2nd or 3rd. But most people who add a month really just want the next month and don’t care about day counts — so “next month” is conceptually distinct from “add a month.” Derick has been brainstorming better interfaces so people can’t make these mistakes, though it’s a lot of work.

They touch on Carbon as a unified interface people understand, but agree that making Carbon the language standard isn’t the right move. At the language level you need something that works for everybody and ideally doesn’t break existing code.

What’s Coming in PHP 8.6

The first new time class is landing: a Duration object representing seconds and nanoseconds within a specific range, living in the Time namespace. It’s a trial run for new APIs and immediately useful — for example, passing a duration to sleep or to timeouts in the new polling API, rather than juggling raw integers.

Another highlight is partial function application. With the pipe operator from 8.5, piping into anything that takes more than one argument meant wrapping it in a closure (and extra parentheses because of how the parser works). Partials let you pre-fill some arguments so the resulting callable accepts just one — perfect for pipelines.

There’s also TLS session resumption support for streams, which lets OpenSSL shortcut the expensive session setup on repeated TLS connections. Bigger stream-layer work by Jakub Zelenka of the PHP Foundation is underway too, but that’s a huge job on old code and won’t make 8.6 — Chris and Derick both note the pain of keeping a year-and-a-half-long project in sync with the master branch.

Xdebug in 8.6 and the Xdebug Cloud

Xdebug’s recent headline feature (shipped with 8.5) is native path mapping, which lets you configure remote-to-local path mappings inside Xdebug itself instead of your IDE — handy when your code runs in Docker or on a dev machine. Feedback since release is driving quality-of-life improvements. For 8.6, relatively little is broken, though a change to how PHP reports line numbers needs untangling so debugging stops on the correct lines.

Derick also has a new code-coverage implementation that gives better, more correct results at roughly a 10% speed cost. He’d rather ship correct output than fast output — and points out that PHPCov may be quicker but skips path and branch coverage entirely. The pair discuss how branch coverage doubles your test count at every branching point, and how Xdebug has a hard limit (around 64K) to avoid running out of memory on pathological code.

Finally, Chris asks about Xdebug Cloud — a paid service that enables debugging where networking otherwise wouldn’t, such as remote teams sharing a single development machine (an SSH tunnel only lets one person listen on the debug port). It’s £15/month or £150/year for an individual, priced similarly to Packagist’s private packages, and helps fund Derick’s ongoing Xdebug work. He plans to do more marketing about it this year.

Deprecations, Consensus, and Two-Thirds Votes

Every year PHP collects a big list of deprecations — around 20 to 25 this cycle — voted on separately. Derick is more reluctant than most to approve them, arguing many offer no clear user benefit. His examples: deprecating metaphone() (whose suggested Composer replacement ironically relies on the internal function) and the dechunk filter (which can’t really be removed because HTTP streams use it internally).

The list() deprecation is another sore point — Chris uses it, and the vote is tied 21–21 with one abstention, so it won’t pass under the two-thirds rule. Derick reminds everyone that “yes” needs to be twice “no.” Returning from a finally block is another candidate that makes little sense to use but hurts nothing to keep.

Chris and Derick reflect on how voting was originally meant to confirm consensus reached on the mailing list, not to be the decision itself. A 50%+1 result isn’t consensus; two-thirds is the compromise, even if true 75–80% agreement would be ideal. Joe notes many deprecations are groundwork to reserve keywords for future RFCs — which raises the perennial question of how you measure real-world usage across Composer’s dependency chains.

Infrastructure, the Website, and the Next Generation

The PHP infrastructure has been converted to an Ansible-based repository over the last year and a half (largely by Derick, with help from Joe), replacing a wild mix of individually maintained servers — one was still running FreeBSD 4.3. They’ve also migrated to a new CDN, which brought surprises: a default one-month cache, ignoring the query string in cache keys, and even dark/light mode being an organization-wide setting rather than per-user.

On the website side, everything currently lives in a single root directory of 1999-vintage code, and there’s a long-pending patch to restructure it. The PHP Foundation’s ambassadors program — with speaking, marketing, and research streams — aims to make the very techy php.net homepage speak to CTOs and newcomers about who uses PHP and why it’s a thriving project (only 31-ish years old, versus C’s 60).

The conversation closes on caretakers and the next generation of contributors. Triage, they stress, doesn’t require deep internals knowledge — just reading reports to see if they still make sense is hugely valuable. Security and infrastructure access necessarily stay gatekept for trust reasons, and both agree a bus factor of one (or even two) isn’t good enough. Chris admits he’s struggling to name people who are both nice and know infra.

Links from the show:

Join us live in Discord — discord.phparch.com

Watch live on YouTube — youtube.com/phparch

PHP Tek Conference 2027 — Call for Papers now open

PHP Arch Swag Store — store.phparch.com

Xdebug — and Xdebug Cloud for shared debugging

Magazine discount code ALIVE3 — three free months on an annual digital subscription

Host:

Chris Miller

X: @ccmiller2018

Mastodon: @miller@phpc.social

Bluesky: @ccmiller2018.bsky.social

PHPArch.me: @miller

Mike Page

Mastodon: @MikePageDev@phpc.social

PHPArch.me: @mikepagedev

Streams:

Youtube Channel

Twitch

Connect & Hire

PHP Architect Website

Twitter/X

Mastodon

Hire PHP Developers

Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – the team is available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.

Partner

This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners

Displace



Infrastructure Management, Simplified

Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.

https://displace.tech/





OurCVEs

Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs



CodeRabbit



Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.



PHP Architect Consulting



Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor

PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on.

https://www.phparch.com/consulting/



Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Join Us Live Next Week

Youtube Channel

Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com

The post PHP Alive and Kicking 2026.08.04 appeared first on PHP Architect.

The PHP Podcast – July 30, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling

Time travel is real, birds aren’t. The gang argues about Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, boiling rocks, and stones (the weight kind), then gets into PSR-3 logging, the PHP ecosystem, AI slop bug reports, Codeberg’s anti-AI stance, and Laravel Cloud’s scale-to-zero magic.

Fahrenheit, Boiling Rocks, and Byte-Ordering Dates

The show opened with Joe admitting he jumbles her hours, minutes, and seconds — and getting mocked by Europeans for a cache-control header PR on the PHP website. That kicked off a tangent about how the American month-day-year ordering is, as Sara put it, “middle-endian” nonsense that makes no sense as a byte ordering.

From there the crew tumbled down a rabbit hole of measurement units. Joe planted his flag on Fahrenheit as the human-centered temperature scale, while Sara argued that if you stop being “speciesist” about it, water-based Celsius wins. The debate somehow escalated into whether rocks boil, with Google eventually schooling everyone that molten rock vaporizes north of 3,000°C (5,400°F), and a callback to British “stones” as boomer energy nobody younger than half a century actually uses.

Proper Logging with PSR-3

Joe walked through Marco Pivetta’s blog post on proper logging with PSR-3, praising it as a great write-up on injecting loggers via dependency injection and the “some logs are better than no logs” philosophy. A common trap Marco calls out: apps stuffed with beautifully descriptive info-level logs that nobody ever sees because production never runs in info mode.

The big selling point of sticking to a PSR-3-compatible interface is minimal dependencies — instead of pulling in three or four packages and wiring up a pile of configuration, the upstream decisions are already made for you. Holly pushed back on the ergonomics of `$this->logger->error()` feeling heavy for every log call, which spun off a delightfully unhinged RFC pitch: built-in emoji functions where the emoji logs an error and logs a panic.

The Ecosystem Is Why People Stay

The hosts pushed back on the recurring “PHP needs feature X because language Y has it” argument. Sara’s take: if another language is genuinely the better tool, nothing stops you from using it — and revamping PHP’s onboarding process is a far better way to attract newcomers than chasing features would-be developers may never even use.

Holly cut to what everyone had glossed over: the ecosystem. You can write Swift on the server with Vapor, but you won’t have the libraries. Whatever you need in PHP, it already exists. A listener even pointed Joe at Brent Roose’s Tempest framework mid-stream to solve a code-highlighting problem on his blog. That gravitational pull of “whatever you need, it’s here” is what keeps people in the PHP orbit.

AI, Layoffs, and Graybeards

Sparked by Gemma’s blog post “Infrastructure and Other Paradoxes” — where an LLM cheerfully suggested folding four brand-new tools (Terraform, Nix, NixOS, Guix) into a team that’s expert in none of them — the crew dug into where AI helps and where it hurts. The consensus: AI is a force multiplier for research and analysis, but it can’t replace the human judgment of knowing what *not* to ship.

Joe brought up an Inc.com article claiming 55% of leadership now regret their major layoffs, with companies like Ford rehiring graybeards because nobody left knew how the software worked. Holly noted this cycle isn’t new, just operating at a terrifying new scale, and Sara emphasized that AI accelerates shipping crap just as easily as it accelerates shipping good work — you still have to fundamentally understand the changes you’re applying.

Codeberg’s Anti-AI Stance & the Slop Bug Report Problem

Holly introduced Codeberg — the nonprofit, community-led GitHub alternative built on Forgejo — and its new policy banning AI/vibe-coded contributions, including a clause flagging work disproportionate to a project’s contributor count. The hosts respected the position but worried it might spell the end of Codeberg, since experienced open-source folks lean on AI tooling (like partner CodeRabbit and traditional static analyzers) as force multipliers.

That led into Sara’s frustration with AI-generated security slop. Daniel Stenberg shut down Curl’s bug bounty program over reports where someone’s own test program deliberately creates RCEs and blames Curl. The fix, Sara argued, is a one-paragraph “elevator pitch” summary — and a plea to maintainers to mark every slop report as spam so GitHub eventually bans the account. The group riffed on adversarial AI (two Claude contexts checking each other, like Apple Intelligence verifying sports-game summaries) as a defensive triage layer, while acknowledging people are simply too dumb to run “double-check this before submitting.”

Laracon: Laravel Cloud Scale-to-Zero

Eric was off at Laracon, which meant peak morale at PHP Architect. The coolest announcement, in Joe’s view, was Laravel Cloud’s scale-to-zero: your entire stack — app server, Valkey, and MySQL — can scale down to nothing when idle and spin back up in under 500 milliseconds on the next request. That’s a potential game-changer for side projects with bursty, uneven traffic and no DevOps army.

Holly and Sara were skeptical about how you cold-start a MySQL instance that fast — almost certainly a pause/resume rather than a true cold start. Other Laracon news: a Laravel language server protocol for better autocomplete and code navigation, plus managed queues that also scale to zero and only wake when a job needs firing.

Links from the show:

PHP Tek 2027 — Chicago, April 27–29, CFP open through end of August

Join us live in Discord

PHP Arch Swag Store

Proper logging in PHP with PSR-3

Codeberg — Software development, but free

Tempest by Brent Roose

infraslopture and other paradoxes

companies regret laying off humans for AI

Hosts:

Joe Ferguson

Mastodon: @joepferguson@phpc.social

PHPArch.me: @svpernova09

Sara Golemon

Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social

Holly Schilling

Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt

Streams:

Youtube Channel

Twitch

Connect & Hire

PHP Architect Website

Twitter/X

Mastodon

Hire PHP Developers

Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – the team is available for consulting, infrastructure work, and code review.

Partner

This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners

Displace



Infrastructure Management, Simplified

Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.

https://displace.tech/





OurCVEs

Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs



CodeRabbit



Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.





PHP Architect Consulting



Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor

PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on.

https://www.phparch.com/consulting/



Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Join Us Live Next Week

Youtube Channel

Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com

The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.30 appeared first on PHP Architect.

PHP Podcast – July 23, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon, and Holly Schilling

Eric got ousted from his own show (no pants required), Holly’s elephants are lost somewhere in the U.S., and the crew talks SIMD, PHP 8.6 feature freeze, and whether AI can actually create. Also, socks.

A Show Without Pants: The Guest Takeover

This week Eric got booted from his own podcast while John was off doing something more important, leaving Holly, Sara, and Producer Joe to run the show. The gang wasted no time reminding everyone that the correct Discord URL is discord.phparch.com — not phparch.com/discord — a mistake that ended up as tomorrow’s task list item for Joe.

There was plenty of housekeeping to get through: PHP Tek 2027 lands April 27th through 29th in Chicago, the CFP is open, and the call for papers closes August 31st. Holly, ever the deadline enthusiast, admitted she loves “the sound deadlines make as they whoosh by,” which set the tone for much of the episode.

And yes, the swag store now has PHP Architect socks. There was extensive debate about whether the socks are safe for large-footed individuals, whether banana-for-scale photos are needed, and whether Eric should post feet pics. DuckNizzle bought some socks. We are also, apparently, SOC 2 certified.

The Great Elephant Migration

Sara’s elephant herd is currently scattered across the United States, most of them somewhere between Chicago and California courtesy of U-Haul. With import forms to Portugal not yet ready, the plush pachyderms are taking a scenic detour west before eventually making their way overseas.

Only six elephants are currently on hand, and technically none of them are PHP Architect elephants — though one is a PHP Roundtable elephant, prompting the recurring wish that someone should bring that podcast back. Spoiler: they might, more on that later.

Sara also shared she’s been in intensive foreign language classes every day, getting up at 7 a.m. while not falling asleep until 2 a.m., all while assembling a Prusa Core One+ 3D printer kit with roughly 300 pages of instructions and hundreds of tiny pieces.

SIMD and Data Science in PHP

Joe brought a blog post from Mitchell Hashimoto arguing that everyone should know SIMD — Single Instruction, Multiple Data. It’s a form of parallel computing that can dramatically speed up large data processing, offering 8x, 10x, even 100x improvements when you’re working with hundreds of thousands or millions of records. It won’t help you loop over a 100-item array, but it might supercharge a FlowPHP parquet file with millions of rows.

Sara pushed back on how deep into the processor this discussion goes, noting that floating point math already flows through the SIMD registers — so in a very narrow sense, you’re already getting SIMD support in current PHP. Reordering instructions safely is another matter entirely (see: Intel’s history of getting it wrong).

The conversation tied back to Florian Englehart’s “One Billion Rows” talk at PHP Tek 2025, and Holly mentioned her monomorphic generics work now supports variadic types — meaning a typed vector structure could, with a bit of JIT work, make SIMD-style patterns possible in PHP’s near future.

PHP 8.6 Feature Freeze Is Coming

Code freeze for PHP 8.6 lands August 11th — less than three weeks out. The release managers admitted they flubbed and missed the five-week warning email that should have gone out July 6th, though the four-week email did go out July 13th and a two-week warning is coming next Monday.

Sara, one of PHP’s previous release managers, was philosophical about people panicking at the deadline: you’ve had twelve months, your lack of planning is not the release team’s problem. An idea to move the feature freeze date was floated and quickly shot down — the cadence has been established for years, and one missed email doesn’t change that.

Larry got a shout-out for suggesting internals push all new business to September so 8.6 can get properly tested. And Holly declared, in full Benevolent Dictator mode, that the next release simply has to be 9.0 — too many big features to ship for a mere 8.7.

AI, Copyright, and Whether Machines Can Create

The crew dug into AI, starting with the news that a judge approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright lawsuit settlement — with roughly two-thirds going to lawyers. On the brighter side, Anthropic is giving a million dollars to Code Crew, a Memphis nonprofit building a physical location to offer less-predatory career training.

Holly described using AI to implement a new module dereference operator (colon greater-than) that exists nowhere but her own machine, arguing the AI isn’t stealing when it follows precise instructions to generate novel syntax. Sara countered that the LLM isn’t creating so much as blending existing functionality — following instructions rather than inventing.

The debate turned philosophical: how much truly new code have humans written in the last decade? We stand on the shoulders of giants, we’re “thinking meat sacks,” and Sara cheerfully accepted the label of “biased anti-clanker bigot.” The Terminator is coming for Larry first, apparently.

Foundation Transparency and Household Jira

The PHP Foundation published a quarterly progress report authored by Elizabeth, detailing what every contractor and employee has been working on. Holly praised Elizabeth for bringing the transparency the Foundation had long lacked, since devs have a lot of autonomy and asking them what they’re doing is, apparently, the worst.

This spiraled into a discussion of household project management — one host’s wife is a project manager, another family installed a Jira instance for their home that the programmer husband absolutely hates, and there’s a gamified house-cleaning app that Holly refuses to adopt for fear she’ll either become obsessed or start a fight over losing.

The episode wrapped with talk of finally reviving PHP Roundtable (scheduling permitting), Longhorn PHP acceptances, and gentle ribbing that Eric and John are “getting up in years” and can’t perform with their usual podcast consistency. There’s a pill for that.

Links from the show:

PHP Tek 2027 — Chicago, April 27–29, CFP closes August 31

PHP Architect Swag Store — now with socks

Join our Discord

Hosts:

Joe Ferguson

Mastodon: @joepferguson@social.social

PHPArch.me: @svpernova09

Sara Golemon

Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social

Holly Schilling

Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt

Streams:

Youtube Channel

Twitch

Connect & Hire

PHP Architect Website

Twitter/X

Mastodon

Hire PHP Developers

Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.

Partner

This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners

Displace



Infrastructure Management, Simplified

Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.

https://displace.tech/





OurCVEs

Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs



CodeRabbit



Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.



PHP Architect Consulting



Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor

PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on

https://www.phparch.com/consulting/



Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Join Us Live Next Week

Youtube Channel

Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com

The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.23 appeared first on PHP Architect.