php[podcast] episodes from 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



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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.



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.

PHP Foundation Community Hour – September 10, 2026

Hosts: Elizabeth Barron & Matt Stauffer

The very first PHP Foundation Community Hour kicks off with autumn vibes, a blog post that started it all, and one big message: contributing to PHP is easier — and broader — than you think.

Welcome to the First Community Hour

Elizabeth Barron opened the very first PHP Foundation Community Hour alongside Matt Stauffer, CEO of Tighten and a member of the Foundation’s board of directors. The idea grew out of a simple desire to make the Foundation more accessible and to give the community more points of contact.

The original concept was just a Zoom call where anyone could drop in and ask questions, but it evolved into something with a purpose and a theme. Big thanks went to the folks at PHP Architect for providing the platform and infrastructure, and to Joe Ferguson for producing behind the scenes.

Matt introduced himself and his work leading a PHP (and Laravel) consultancy that specializes in rescuing and modernizing legacy applications. He shared why he loves that space: PHP powers functional code spread across the internet doing real good for real people, which is exactly why he cares so much about the language and the Foundation.

The Blog Post That Started It All

The theme for these next few months came from a post Matt wrote about how people can contribute back to PHP: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/08/17/how-to-contribute-to-php/ His motivation was making programming accessible — he writes books, does podcasts, and speaks at conferences so people can enter the field and transform their lives.

Matt admitted he’d often found it hard, even as an experienced open-source contributor, to contribute to PHP itself. Digging into why, he found both truth and misconception. Some contributions happen in ways we don’t call “contributing to PHP” but should, and some pathways genuinely need better communication and community building.

His goal was a single canonical starting place — a short blog post that says “start here” for anyone who’s always wanted to contribute. It’s also a reminder to himself to know the current reality rather than criticizing PHP based on how it worked 15 or 20 years ago.

The Lowest Barrier to Contributing

Asked where someone with no or low barrier should start, Matt’s answer was simple: wherever you already are. If you have a local meetup, go to it. If you attend a conference, get more involved — even just buying a ticket counts. After that, the most newcomer-focused options are the things the Foundation builds specifically for newcomers, like ambassador programs and surveys.

The most important point Matt hammered home: contributing to any individual component, framework, package, or meetup is contributing to PHP. Working on WordPress, Laravel, or Symfony all counts. It does not have to be the language itself to matter.

Elizabeth agreed wholeheartedly that the definition of contribution should be broad. Every interaction, every engagement, every time someone shows up somewhere is a contribution. Newcomers are especially valuable — they can spot the gaps and holes that long-time maintainers no longer see. For those who do want to work on the language itself, Matt suggested reproducing other people’s bugs from the PHP source repo as the easiest onboarding point.

Everybody Matters in the PHP Community

Matt offered a definition of what it means to be part of the PHP community: if you’ve written or read a line of code, been assigned to a PHP project, or even just asked “am I a member of the PHP community?” — you are one. Full stop. And you’re no more or less important than someone who’s been doing it for decades.

Elizabeth shared that the Foundation recently started an onboarding special interest group where mentorship will be a topic, aimed at improving the overwhelming newcomer experience. They discussed the idea of a central hub or resource for contribution opportunities. Matt was cautiously supportive — worried programmers might over-engineer a tool instead of doing the work, but open to something that points people to where each community already lists its opportunities, while the Foundation creates that space specifically for the PHP language itself.

Matt shared his own contribution origin story: his first pull requests, back in September and October 2012, were to jQuery responsive-design plugins. Neither was merged, but the experience taught him that open source doesn’t need to reflect every person’s specific needs, and that most people online are genuinely kind and well-intended.

User Groups, SIGs, and Timezone Challenges

Responding to a chat question, Elizabeth confirmed the Foundation plans to launch a special interest group for user group and conference organizers to share challenges around attendance, speakers, and sponsors. She’d love to eventually offer micro-grants to help new groups get started, though that requires budgeting and board conversations.

Matt debunked the perception that user groups are expensive to run. Food is usually the biggest cost — and you don’t need food at all. The most valuable thing is a host willing to donate space. He described a recent Atlanta PHP meetup with nothing but a few six-packs and some leftover pastries that worked out perfectly fine.

The conversation turned to the eternal challenge of timezones and async collaboration. Both agreed async is great for inclusivity, especially for non-native English speakers, but some things simply can’t happen asynchronously with the same quality. In-person and real-time contact build trust and relationships in ways text alone can’t, whether for a company, a user group, or the Foundation’s own special interest groups.

Designers, Docs, and Making It Easier to Contribute

Matt made the case that being different from everyone else in a community makes you exceptional. Designers aren’t prolific in the PHP world, so a designer who steps up — like the one helping modernize php.net’s visuals — can have massive impact without ever writing a line of C. The same goes for writers, social media people, and accessibility experts.

On what the Foundation can do to help, Matt suggested more universally accessible, perennial resources rather than blog posts that go stale. PHP’s own “how to contribute” page is out of date and language-focused. He proposed the Foundation website host a broader contribution guide that links out to each community’s canonical resources.

He noted the reality that anything on php.net mentioning a sub-community risks drama, so the Foundation website is a better place to start, prove things out, and eventually propose polished changes to php.net. They closed by celebrating internals contributors, infrastructure heroes like Derick Rethans and Joe Ferguson, and every kind of skill — social media included — that the PHP ecosystem needs.

Links from the show:

PHP Foundation — How to contribute back to PHP

PHP Architect — Platform & production partner

Host:

Elizabeth Barron

Mastodon: @elizabeth@fosstodon.org

LinkedIn: elizabethn

Matt Stauffer

X: @mattstauffer

Bluesky: @mattstauffer.com

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



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 Foundation Community Hour Podcast 2026.09.10 appeared first on PHP Architect.

In this episode, Scott talks with Nia Luckey about her new book “Trust Hacked: What Firewalls, Failures, and the Frontlines Taught Me About Trust”.

Links:

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

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

Nia’s Links:

Book – https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/9781003688815/trust-hacked-nia-luckey

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.

PHPScore

Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore

https://phpscore.com/

CodeRabit

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https://www.coderabbit.ai/

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

#phpc #php #communityCornerPodcast #podcast #phptek

The post Community Corner: Trust Hacked with Nia Luckey appeared first on PHP Architect.