php[podcast] episodes from php[architect]

PHP Podcast – October 22, 2026

Hosts: Holly, Sara, Joe – Special Guest Daniel Scherzer

PHP ships an emergency security release a day early, Daniel Scherzer pushes the commits at 6:30am on four hours of sleep, and governments across Europe start pulling servers offline. Oh, and a 12-pound dog nearly killed Holly.

The PHP2Shell Security Release

Special guest Daniel Scherzer — release manager for PHP 8.5 and 8.6 and a recent addition to the PHP ecosystem security team — walked the crew through the week’s big story: two critical CVEs that could lead to remote code execution. The team coordinated a synchronized release across PHP 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, and 8.5.12, with additional source backports provided for 7.4, 8.0, and 8.1 given how severe the vulnerabilities were.

Daniel described the stress of it all, including waking up at 1am with a headache before a 5am alarm and a release process planned for 1300 UTC. In the end he volunteered to push every change himself, running three commands to push a whole bunch of commits across three repositories in a single atomic operation — four tags and seven branches at 1335 UTC, just before public disclosure.

He also drew a clear line around the hats he wears. As a release manager he had early access to the fix, but he deliberately did not patch his own PHP-powered website ahead of time, explaining that the community trusted him to help release PHP, not because he was important enough to get early access for personal use. Governments in Europe were turning off public-facing sites and the NSA published guidance, leaving Daniel marveling at how he ended up with a front-row seat to something heads of government were paying attention to.

A Two-Year-Old Bug and the AI Angle

The vulnerability wasn’t new — it was originally discovered back in 2024 during the security audit funded through the PHP Foundation via the German government’s Sovereign Tech grant. The bug reportedly traces back through the PHP 5 series and possibly even PHP 4. What changed in 2026 was that someone (with AI tooling assistance) figured out how to turn a theoretical vulnerability into a workable exploit.

Daniel pushed back on the framing that AI simply “found” the bug, emphasizing the two years in between where it was known but there weren’t enough maintainer hours or infrastructure to address it. At the time it was essentially a theoretical bug with no consistently provable exploit path. He cautioned that AI-discovered vulnerabilities shouldn’t be assumed correct without a human reviewing them, noting he hadn’t yet seen a clean proof-of-concept that didn’t also rely on some other underlying server vulnerability.

The group discussed the rate of security reports skyrocketing as LLMs become common, with Sara describing the bandwidth problem the volunteer security team faces: triaging what’s likely to be exploited, confirming fixes are actually complete, and avoiding publishing an incomplete fix that tips off bad actors. Amazon claimed to have seen exploitation attempts beforehand, but the release manager chat showed no indication the bug was ever exploited in the wild before the release.

Fund the Volunteers Who Hold Up the Internet

A recurring theme was that PHP is fundamentally a volunteer-driven effort. The packagers for Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat — Remy and Andres — were both on vacation and stopped their plans to package PHP a day early. The Docker library maintainers are volunteers too, as are many members of the Foundation security team who are still not paid contractors.

The crew highlighted a Mastodon post from Nils Alderman arguing that if the governments shutting down servers, the hosting companies, and the enterprises terrified by this vulnerability each gave even $50,000 a year to the PHP Foundation, things could look very different. Daniel echoed this: had there been infinite money and maintainer hours, every theoretical vulnerability might get fixed as a hardening measure.

Joe shared how PHP Architect Consulting had its first client patched roughly 30 minutes after the fix went live — thanks to a tip from Marco Pavetta about forking the Docker PHP library repo and building your own base image before the mirrors saturated. He also recounted his own role helping Derick Rethans keep php.net patched before the announcement so the site wouldn’t fall over under load, including one odd bug where the patched version broke Apache directory listing on downloads.php.net.

Life as a Release Manager

With three release managers now on the team — Daniel, Joe, and Matteo Beccati — the conversation turned to what the role actually involves. Joe explained he wanted to learn more about the process, especially how to make judgment calls on backwards-compatibility breaks, and that lots of discussion happens behind the scenes before and during a release. Daniel noted he’d volunteered to be 8.5’s release manager for this exact week over a year ago, and that the Zoom coordination call was his idea.

They dug into an ABI change in the security release that added new fields to the executor globals. The group debated whether that counts as an ABI break — the consensus being it technically is one, but a safe one as long as you’re not mixing newer extensions depending on those fields with older versions in the same branch. Sara and Holly stressed that extensions should never be wholesale copying global blocks in the first place, especially given how differently that memory behaves in threaded versus non-threaded builds.

Daniel shared his origin story: just over two years contributing to PHP, starting with a typo fix to a test name after creating a professional GitHub account under Daniel E. Scherzer. Holly and Sara warned him there’s no escaping — Sara sent her first patch 24 years ago and is still here. The bit about “settling for Joe” ran throughout the whole episode.

Rust, C, and the Rewrite Temptation

Daniel raised the question of rewriting PHP in Rust, pointing out the vulnerability was fundamentally tied to C’s longjmp, which doesn’t exist in Rust. Sara countered that you don’t need a longjmp approach at all — the same behavior could be achieved with C++ exceptions or a Rust mechanism, but it would be a fundamentally different runtime approach.

Holly, half-joking, said she’s one sponsor away from pulling a “bun” and throwing hundreds of thousands of AI agents at a hard rewrite of the PHP engine, predicting this is the first of many memory-safety bugs AI agents will surface in the C codebase. Daniel tempered the hype, noting AIs hallucinate and that this being the first of 100,000 reports doesn’t mean there are 100,000 real memory issues.

The segment wrapped with Daniel’s recent work building PHP extensions in Rust (he gave a workshop on it at Longhorn), digging into the C macros for globals and how ZTS thread-support mode changes everything. The repeated advice: learn it, experiment on your own fork, but don’t mess with it until you actually understand it — and never hit git push to the public source.

Links from the show:

PHP Tek 2027 — April 27–29 in Chicago, early bird tickets available

PHP Tek CFP — closes end of October 2026

Scherzer.dev — Daniel’s site, blog, timeline write-up, and hire info

PHP Foundation — donate to support PHP security work

https://phpc.social/@naderman/117485091076355564

Today’s PHP Security Release, and How We’re Strengthening PHP Security

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



PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on. Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor. Learn more.



Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Join Us Live Next Week

Youtube Channel

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

The post The PHP Podcast 2026.10.22 appeared first on PHP Architect.

In this episode, Scott talks with Damien Seguy about the history of the elePHPant, from Vincent Pontier’s logo doodle to 6,054 plush toys in Damien’s home, how the community trades them through the Community Postal Service, and what it takes to create your own.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:52 How the PHP logo became an elephant

03:53 Turning the logo into a plush toy

05:29 elePHPants for user groups, companies and conferences

07:56 Trading and the Community Postal Service

10:25 The chocolate factory handoff

15:55 How to create your own elePHPant

19:17 Colors, nails and accessories

24:33 Scratchy: elePHPants for small user groups

27:39 Exakat and the PHP onboarding book

Links:

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

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

Mentioned in this episode:

Exakat static analysis engine – https://www.exakat.io/

PHP onboarding book (feedback welcome) – https://thephpbook.readthedocs.io/en/latest

Damien’s Links:

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

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

GitHub – https://github.com/dseguy

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/

The post Community Corner Podcast: elePHPants with Damien Seguy appeared first on PHP Architect.

PHP Podcast – October 15, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson & Holly Schilling

Longhorn PHP kicks off, agentic commerce gets scary, bots keep scanning, and a Cold War satellite schematic proves software is harder than hardware.

Swag, Longhorn PHP, and “Am I Even a PHP Developer?”

Joe opened by confessing he found a JavaScript bug in the swag store cart while ordering socks and a hoodie — the curse of being a developer who can only ever see the bugs. Holly joked that Sara got bumped from the show for refusing to wear swag, while Eric apparently bought one of everything in the store, including a Peanuts-style team picture card from PHP Tech.

The conversation turned to Longhorn PHP 2026, which kicked off with a tutorial day and runs through the main talk day on Friday. Holly is presenting remotely after travel plans fell through, giving a talk on her pet peeve: websites that get “packaged up” and shipped as apps instead of being built as real native applications.

That led into a heartfelt riff on imposter syndrome. Holly admitted she’s spent years insisting she’s “not really a PHP developer” despite submitting RFCs, speaking at conferences, and having an elephpant named after her. Joe shared his own years at a Python startup where he felt like a fraud for only writing PHP nights and weekends. The takeaway: showing up in community spaces — Discord, social media, GitHub, conferences — is all it takes to belong.

Agentic Commerce and Single-Use Card Security

Joe highlighted a Community Corner episode with Scott Keck-Warren and Paul Conroy on agentic commerce — the slightly terrifying idea of your Claude agent going out shopping on your behalf. Holly was especially wary of trusting Gemini for shopping advice given Google’s long history of steering how people search and buy.

Much of the underlying tech, they noted, lives in Stripe and resembles Apple Pay-style single-use card numbers: time-limited, amount-limited tokens that protect the real source card. Holly drew on her experience at a buy-now-pay-later company (now branded FlexPay) doing one-time code generation, where even 15-minute-lived card numbers required full PCI compliance, certificate pinning, HMAC, encryption at rest, and constant audits across every layer from mobile SDK to backend.

Bots, Scrapers, and Cloudflare to the Rescue

A Discord listener (ducknizzle) asked what everyone uses to kill bot and scanner traffic on public sites. Joe’s pessimistic answer: block ranges, sometimes entire countries, and ultimately just put it behind Cloudflare and let specialists deal with it — the same way you’d pay someone to host email rather than running it yourself.

Holly praised Cloudflare Pages for static content, calling it free and “it just works” with zero bandwidth worries, though WordPress makes things more complicated. Joe talked about his work-in-progress effort to standardize robots.txt across php.net properties, while acknowledging it only helps the well-behaved crawlers — malicious scrapers and AI training bots will simply ignore it. Holly estimated AI scrapers now outnumber legitimate bots roughly 10 to 1, and both lamented how the internet has lost some of its earlier friendliness.

How the PHP Security Team Handles Your Reports

Joe showcased a PHP Foundation blog post describing how the security team triages reports, sharing insight from his new role as a release manager. Release managers get advance heads-up on security releases, which follow extra processes to handle disclosures responsibly.

He explained that every report is read, triaged, and prioritized — someone in Discord recently got confirmation their advisory was “in the backlog.” The sobering reality is that the greater PHP security team is only one or two humans, reflecting the open-source nature of the project. The team can now issue its own CVEs rather than waiting on GitHub, so fixes and packager updates can ship as fast as possible. Joe noted serious, wild remote-code-execution-level vulnerabilities remain rare, especially this early in the 8.6 cycle, which just branched from master.

New PHP News Site, Design, and php.net’s Redesign

Joe demoed a new PHP ecosystem news site from Eric Barnes (Laravel News) and Matt Stauffer (Titan) in collaboration with the PHP Foundation — a modern aggregator reminiscent of the old Planet PHP days, complete with RFC coverage, a newsletter, topic sections, and a slick automatic dark mode toggle. Holly, admitting she has no eye for design herself, loved how well it was executed.

That sparked a running theme of developer respect for design as a discipline neither host feels competent in. Joe mentioned a php.net redesign in progress — mock-ups are available in the PHPC Discord’s PHP Foundation Ambassador Marketing subgroup, though it’s still a work in progress and not yet mobile friendly. Both admitted feeling like outsiders in design meetings the way non-developers feel in dev meetings. Joe shared Anthropic’s guidance to tell Claude what you *don’t* want for front-end work, to which he replied that as a developer, he often doesn’t even know what he doesn’t want.

A Satellite Schematic vs. a Million Lines of Code

Holly launched into a favorite tangent, inspired by Apple releasing its home hub device years after the hardware was ready and pundits asking why the software took so long. Working on her own project with 16 encryption keys across five servers, she had to draw diagrams just to keep the key exchanges straight.

She then described a treasured artifact: a 3-by-9-foot schematic of an entire FSC-78 Bravo-mod satellite terminal from her Army SATCOM days at Fort Detrich — the whole Cold War-grade, anti-jamming system fitting on roughly 65 letter-sized pages. Contrast that with Margaret Hamilton’s famous photo beside the Apollo code printouts: around a million lines, a scale that’s routine in modern projects. Her point: software complexity dwarfs even elaborate hardware, and developers rarely give themselves credit for it — leaky abstractions, uncaught exceptions, and endless edge cases don’t plague hardware the way they plague code.

The discussion wrapped with fault tolerance stories: Joe discovered a three-node Elasticsearch staging cluster where failover had never been enabled (and only one node was taking all the traffic), and Holly recalled a satellite timing setup with redundant cesium sources where the only part that kept failing monthly was the single non-redundant box joining them together. Fault tolerance, they agreed, is important.

Links from the show:

PHP Tech 2027 — Chicago, April 27–29, tickets & CFP open

Join us in Discord

PHP Arch Swag Store

PHP Foundation — How the Security Team Handles Your Reports

Community Corner Podcast: Agentic Commerce with Paul Conroy

2027 State of Open Source Survey (Perforce / OpenLogic / Zend)

PHP Architect Consulting

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. Learn more.



Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Join Us Live Next Week

Youtube Channel

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

The post The PHP Podcast 2026.10.15 appeared first on PHP Architect.

In this episode, Scott talks with Paul Conroy about agentic commerce: how AI agents buy things on our behalf, how Stripe’s shared payment tokens keep them on a budget, and how the Machine Payments Protocol finally puts HTTP 402 Payment Required to work in your API middleware.

Links:

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

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

Mentioned in this episode:

Charging AI Agents Per Request: A Practical Guide to the Machine Payments Protocol – https://conroyp.com/articles/practical-guide-machine-payments-protocol

Agentic Commerce Beyond The Checkout: Building with Machine Payments (Paul’s talk) – https://conroyp.com/speaking/agentic-commerce-beyond-the-checkout-building-with-machine-payments

PayForGoals.com, the MPP demo – https://payforgoals.com

PayForGoals.com source code – https://github.com/square1-io/www.payforgoals.com

laravel-mpp package – https://github.com/square1-io/laravel-mpp

Stripe Machine Payments Protocol quickstart – https://docs.stripe.com/payments/machine/mpp/quickstart

Paul’s Links:

Website – https://conroyp.com

Company: Square1 – https://square1.io

X / Twitter – https://x.com/conroyp

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

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulconroy2/

GitHub – https://github.com/conroyp

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/

The post Community Corner Podcast: Agentic Commerce with Paul Conroy appeared first on PHP Architect.

PHP Foundation Community Hour – October 8, 2026

Hosts: Elizabeth Barron & James Titcumb

James tells the story of how he fell into open source, breaks down what Pie actually does, celebrates the 1.5 release, and shares real advice for anyone nervous about making their first contribution.

How James Got Into Open Source

James traced his open source journey back many years to a set of Zend Framework 1 helper classes he found useful enough to publish, back when he wasn’t even sure GitHub existed yet. From there he built a little tool to deploy code from Git over SSH at a previous employer, replacing a hand-upload process that he knew had to be modernized.

Things really took off when he joined Roave, where contributing was actively encouraged and he was surrounded by prolific maintainers like Marco working on Doctrine, alongside in-house libraries such as Security Advisories and Better Reflection. Having a supportive employer early on made all the difference, letting him do the work during the day instead of squeezing it into nights and weekends.

Elizabeth reflected that this is a common on-ramp into open source: scratch your own itch, put it out there, and hope it helps someone with the same problem. She emphasized how much employer support, team mentorship, and a genuine culture of open source help newcomers find their footing.

What Pie Is and Why It Exists

James explained that Pie came about because the infrastructure around PECL and PEAR is simply aging, with very few people who know the code base well enough to maintain it. The PHP Foundation approached him to overhaul that tooling, applying the hard-won lessons of Composer — which he agrees is arguably the best package manager for any language.

Under the hood, Pie is really a very fancy wrapper around four commands — phpize, configure, make, and make install — plus a lot of dependency management and making sure you get the right package for your specific PHP install, something PECL never really did. Thanks to the Packagist team setting up an extensions area, Pie plugs into Composer’s source code to get that dependency resolution for free.

A key distinction is that you aren’t installing extensions for a project the way you do with Composer packages — you’re installing them for a particular PHP install. Pie manages this in a dedicated Pie home directory, keeping each of your many PHP versions and their extensions sorted out. James’s bigger goal has evolved from simply replacing PECL to making installing an extension as frictionless as installing a PHP package.

Democratizing Extensions and the Windows Challenge

Moving off PECL’s centralized repository and onto Packagist means literally anyone can now submit an extension, the same way they publish PHP packages. James noted that when problems come up there are usually three kinds of fixes: improving something in Pi, writing better documentation, or working with an extension author who hasn’t configured their composer.json correctly.

Because extensions have unique needs, the Composer team added new Pi-specific options to specify configure flags, supported platforms, and architectures — concepts Composer never had since it only ever dealt with pure PHP code. A Windows-only library extension is useless on macOS or Linux, and a systemd-dependent one is useless on Windows, so that categorization matters.

The most common friction point James sees is Windows extensions. Unlike PECL, which auto-compiled DLLs from uploaded source, the Pie ecosystem requires authors to build the DLL themselves — handled through a GitHub Action called PHP Windows Builder, which Shivam worked on. For security reasons Pie deliberately can’t just download and run arbitrary binaries on people’s systems.

The 1.5 Release

Elizabeth congratulated James on shipping 1.5, a significant release that pulled together several large, closely-related requests. A lot of it grew from working with the author of the mlocati Docker PHP extension installer, mapping out everything Pie does on a whiteboard to see where changes could unlock multiple features at once.

The big internal change was fixing how Pie handles locking, bringing it much closer to how Composer manages its own lock file. That one improvement enabled installing multiple extensions at once, making a reinstall of an already-installed extension a no-op, installing reproducibly from a lock file, and the long-requested Pie upgrade command that bumps all your Pie extensions in one go.

The other massive chunk of work was the attestation library. It started as a bare-bones OpenSSL-based verification of GitHub attestation certificates — written with help from Tim Düsterhus so people could verify Pi’s authenticity without needing the gh CLI. For 1.5, James ran it against the Sigstore conformance test suite and filled in a huge number of gaps, bringing it close to full conformance on the verification side. That opens the door to the Composer team’s stated interest in authenticating PHP packages down the line.

Advice for New Contributors

Asked what he’d tell his past self, James kept it simple: just get involved, and always assume good intent. If a maintainer doesn’t respond within a day they’re probably just busy — not ignoring you — and lengthy back-and-forth on a pull request usually reflects a maintainer trying to keep the project maintainable, not nitpicking.

He encouraged everyone to open a discussion before sending a PR so effort doesn’t get duplicated — a lesson learned after early contributions collided with work he already had in progress. To help with that, he adds a “maintainer investigating” label to issues he’s actively working on, and leans on issue and PR templates to steer people in the right direction.

Elizabeth added that newer coders can find it intimidating to put their work out publicly on GitHub forever, and that both sides benefit from a little grace and a shared social contract. James closed by stressing that the single most helpful contribution is feedback — report even the small things you worked around, because eliminating that friction saves the next developer the same headache, as happened with a recent PCRE2 compile fix on macOS.

Links from the show:

Pie(php/pie) — GitHub repository, issues & discussions

PHP Windows Builder GitHub Action

Packagist Extensions

Composer

attestation library

Introduction to PIE

Host:

Elizabeth Barron

Mastodon: @elizabeth@fosstodon.org

LinkedIn: elizabethn

James Titcumb

Mastodon: @asgrim@phpc.social

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.



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 2026.10.08 appeared first on PHP Architect.