php[podcast] episodes from 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.

In this episode, Scott talks with James Cole, creator of Firefly III, an open source personal finance manager. James explains why he built Firefly III after graduating college with student debt, how the rule engine automates transaction categorization, importing bank data with CSV files and third-party connectors like enable banking and GoCardless, and how to get started without importing years of history.

Links:

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

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

James’s Links:

Firefly III – https://www.firefly-iii.org/

Scott’s Links:

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

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

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

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

PHP Architect Social Media:

X: https://x.com/phparch

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

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

Discord: https://discord.phparch.com

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

Partners

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

Displace

Infrastructure Management, Simplified

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

https://displace.tech/

PHPScore

Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore

https://phpscore.com/

CodeRabit

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

https://www.coderabbit.ai/

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

#phpc #php #communityCornerPodcast #podcast #FireflyIII #PersonalFinance #OpenSource

The post Community Corner Podcast: Firefly III with James Cole appeared first on PHP Architect.

PHP Podcast – July 16, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon, and Holly Schilling

Joe hosts with Sarah and Holly while running on no sleep. The PHP Tech 2027 CFP opens, a fake PHP 9 pitch appears, we crown Holly the accidental main character of internals, and everyone agrees dark mode flashing white is a war crime.

PHP Tech 2027 CFP Is Open (And Yes, the Year Is Right This Time)

The big news kicking off the show is that the PHP Tech CFP for 2027 is live and open. You can find it over at Sessionize under php-tech-2027, and unlike a certain demo from the previous week, the date on it is actually correct. There was a brief moment where it displayed 2007, but the team fixed that rather quickly, so credit where credit is due.

The crew marveled at the fact that we are somehow less than six months out from 2027, which spiraled into a conversation about kids getting learner’s permits, full beards showing up on children who were toddlers just yesterday, and whether anyone’s offspring might actually submit a talk. Helldivers came up. Freedom was spread. And there was a gentle suggestion that SoCalKid and their newly engaged fiancé should be sent the CFP URL immediately.

Meanwhile, PHP Tech 2026 videos are rolling out on PHP Tech TV. There are currently 37 available with more still processing thanks to some technical and room issues at the event. Several talks are completely free, including Joe’s talk on modernizing DevOps, Kaylin’s “Modernize Your Old School Endpoints with HTMX,” and both of Ben Ramsey’s talks.

Working Groups, Discord, and the People Who Actually Care

The conversation turned to the internals process and Ben Ramsey’s working group proposal on the internals mailing list, which the crew encouraged everyone to actually read. The idea of giving working groups some autonomy and even decision-making power drew broad agreement as a way to produce more fully-fleshed RFCs rather than one person’s implementation of a giant feature.

A recurring point of confusion is the reference to “Discord conversations” in RFCs. There is no official PHP.net Discord, but phpc.chat will get you to the Discord (and previously the bridged IRC). The PHP Internals channel is where a lot of discussion happens, though far from the only place, and there are also the PHP Foundation and new Foundation Ambassadors channels.

Big appreciation went out to the moderators keeping that Discord spam-free and troll-free, with a special shout to Tiffany, who is an absolute machine at helping people, pointing them in the right direction, and posting top-tier cat pictures in the pet flexing channel.

The recurring theme: decisions are made by the people who show up. Silence is acquiescence, and if you have issues, speak up. Holly famously just showed up in internals one day, started talking, and they let her stay.

This Week in Internals and the Co-Scientist Show

Joe wanted to highlight Artisan Build’s YouTube channel, specifically their “This Week in Internals” videos. They are fantastic recaps of what’s happening in the internals world, complete with a very light sprinkling of extremely dry comedic timing that lands perfectly.

The videos break down email threads and RFCs into easily digestible summaries of what people are arguing over, then poke a little fun at the sillier arguments. A weekly recap drops regularly and it’s consistently great content for anyone curious about internals.

The crew was also impressed by the host’s ability to nail every name pronunciation on what seems like the first try, which spiraled into Holly’s confession that she has a hard memory limit on names learned after kindergarten. Anyone new is simply “out of bounds.”

Holly’s Fake PHP 9 Pitch: Structs, Modules, and Surfaces

Holly walked through a blog post on eventuallywrong.com featuring a fake PHP 9 pitch full of flagship features she’s prototyped. It kicked off with extensions, which she discovered didn’t exist while trying to build the Longhorn app in native PHP, landing her at the top of that internals video.

Next came structs, which started as an attempt to build tuples (turns out full structs were easier). They’re Swift-style value types with strong typing, and after some grumbling at Larry, she reworked things to support interfaces and traits, leaning into composition over inheritance.

Modules got the PHP-style treatment: a simple module definition, a public interface declaration, and a new `internal` visibility level that lets members be accessed within the same module. No autoloader modifications required, and reflection remains the escape hatch as always.

Finally, surfaces — a keyword that adds a perpendicular-to-visibility scope. A method can belong to a surface, and callers simply declare they want to use that surface of the class. Holly performance-tested it: no impact if unused, minimal impact if used. She also spent a good chunk of the show against friend classes, arguing they’re leaky, unrestricted, and if you’re going to hand out full access to your privates, you shouldn’t have marked them private in the first place.

Release Management, Version Stats, and Upgrade Paths

Holly is a first-time PHP 8.6 release manager alongside Matteo Beccati, with veteran Daniel Scherzer (also on 8.5) rounding out the team. She stepped down from RM in a prior election because others wanted the work — a reminder that people stepping up in open source is a rarity worth celebrating. Release management, she noted, is less a social job and more about moving data at the right time and signing things.

The July 2026 PHP version stats got a thumbs up. Looking at the trends, 8.5 is clearly on the rise, 8.4 climbing slightly, 8.3 starting to trend down, and 8.2 falling harder — exactly the curve you want, with the vast majority sitting inside the support window.

Joe shared that upgrading apps from PHP 7 to 8.3/8.4/8.5 has been a much easier lift than the older 7.x hops, thanks to a more consistent release cadence and better deprecation guidance. Holly pushed back on the idea that 5.6-to-7 was ever hard, while Joe pointed out the real pain came from jumping ancient 5.0/5.1 codebases straight to 7 back before Claude existed. There was also a very in-depth debugging tangent about an opcache build flag no longer being needed on 8.5.

Accessibility, Dark Mode Crimes, and the JetBrains Survey

The JetBrains State of PHP survey is open, and everyone should go take it — there’s even a chance to win one of five vouchers. This led to a discussion about whether JetBrains usage is being decimated by AI tooling, with Holly living almost entirely in the terminal with Claude Code these days while Joe remains loyal to PHPStorm and PyCharm.

Sarah, who is going blind and is not joking about it, kicked off a passionate segment on accessibility. Test your apps with a screen reader. Respect font scaling and contrast (F0F0F0 text on white is a genuine crime). Respect the OS toggles for reduced motion, because autistic users and others depend on them and apps routinely ignore them.

The crew then united around dark mode etiquette: the only reasonable default is system-selected, and the white flash between two dark-mode pages is caused by JavaScript-based theme switching instead of sane CSS selectors. It is, universally agreed, the worst.

The episode closed on eye-tracking privacy (Apple Vision Pro good, Oculus terrifying), heat maps, and a laptop-camera-covering tangent that got appropriately unhinged before Joe called it on that bombshell.

Links from the show:

PHP Tech 2027 CFP — Now open on Sessionize

eventuallywrong.com — Holly’s fake PHP 9 pitch

phpc.chat — Get to the PHP Discord

store.phparch.com — Now with socks

Hosts:

Joe Ferguson

Mastodon: @joepferguson@social.social

PHPArch.me: @svpernova09

Sara Golemon

Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social

Holly Schilling

Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt

Streams:

Youtube Channel

Twitch

Connect & Hire

PHP Architect Website

Twitter/X

Mastodon

Hire PHP Developers

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

Partner

This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners

PHP Architect Consulting

Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor

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

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



Displace



Infrastructure Management, Simplified

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

https://displace.tech/





OurCVEs

Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs



CodeRabbit



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



Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Join Us Live Next Week

Youtube Channel

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

The post The PHP Podcast 2026.07.16 appeared first on PHP Architect.

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

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