Laracon US came back for its 2026 edition on July 28 and 29, at the SoWa Power Station in Boston’s arts district. Two days, one stage, and a lineup of eighteen speakers that ranged from Taylor Otwell himself down to independent educators, package authors, and engineers visiting from outside the Laravel world entirely. If you […]

Video version: https://youtu.be/ZtAKnN6jWbE I love static analysis tools to a degree that my co-workers find annoying. Tools like PHPStan and Psalm catch bugs before they ever reach production, and once you get used to that safety net, it is impossible to imagine coding without it. But there is one thing about these tools that drives […]

🎙️ 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 […]

🎙️ 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: […]

 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 […]

Deploying new features used to mean holding your breath. You merged the branch, pushed to production, and hoped the QA process caught everything. If it didn’t, rollback meant either reverting a deployment or shipping a hotfix under pressure. Feature flags change that story entirely, and Laravel Pennant gives you a first-party, well-designed way to build […]

If you spend most of your PHP time in Laravel or Symfony, you may have noticed a framework quietly picking up momentum over the past couple of years. Tempest describes itself as “the PHP framework that gets out of your way,” and after spending time with version 3.0 — released February 12, 2026 — that […]

Video version https://youtu.be/pxnY6T98G14 You may not realize it, but most developers today sit at their keyboards running a manual while loop without realizing it. You write a prompt, read the response, decide what to ask next, and repeat, over and over again. All day long, you are the thing that keeps the process moving toward […]

If you’ve been using Claude Code as a single monolithic assistant, you’ve only been using half the tool. Subagents — specialized AI assistants that Claude Code can spin up and delegate tasks to — fundamentally change how you work. Instead of context-switching between “write this Pest test,” “optimize that MySQL query,” and “review this Rector […]

 🎙️ 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 […]