If you’ve ever watched a colleague fly through code in NeoVim and thought “that looks fast but I’d never figure out the config,” the barrier to entry has dropped significantly. LazyVim — a NeoVim distribution that ships with sensible defaults and a plugin manager — gives you a fully functional IDE experience within minutes, with […]

PHP 8.5 shipped with a feature that functional programming enthusiasts have been requesting for years: the pipe operator (|>). If you’ve used pipes in Unix shells, Elixir, F#, or even JavaScript proposals, the concept will feel immediately familiar. If you haven’t, you’re about to discover one of the cleanest ways to express data transformations in […]

🎙️ PHP Podcast – June 17, 2026 Hosts: Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling | Guests: Paul Reinheimer & Sean Coates Eric and John are still locked in the basement. Sara is literally on a boat in Spain. Normal show, totally normal. 🚢 Sara Broadcasts from a Harbor in A Coruña Sara is joining this week’s […]

Video version at: https://youtu.be/gAVfQhPw8Do A few weeks ago, I posted something on LinkedIn that ruffled some feathers. Here’s what I said: “Defaulting to the ORM for everything isn’t a best practice. It’s just the path of least resistance.” The replies came in fast, and a good chunk of them said the same thing: “That’s unsafe! […]

🎙️ PHP Podcast – June 11, 2026 Guest Hosts: Sara Golemon, Elizabeth Barron & Holly Schilling Eric and John are out this week — Sara, Elizabeth, and Holly take over. Here’s what they covered: 🎬 PHPVerse Recap PHPVerse just wrapped up, and Elizabeth was there in Amsterdam. The format is unusual — all speakers are […]

Video version: https://youtu.be/5n2VZS_YPv0 Let’s say you’re working on a feature branch called add-discount-codes. You’ve been at it for a couple of days, and you’ve got five commits with all of your work done. A team member mentions that git rebase can make sure you have the most recent changes from the “main” branch. So you […]

🎙️ PHP Podcast – June 4, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered: 🎪 PHP Tek 2027 — New Dates, Bold New Format Mark your calendars: PHP Tek 2027 is happening April 27–29 in Chicago, and Eric and John are shaking things up. […]

🎙️ PHP Podcast – May 28, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Links from the show: PHP barely avoided disaster – YouTube CVE-2026-45793: Anatomy of a 14-Hour PHP Supply-Chain Near-Miss · graycoreio/github-actions-magento2 · Discussion #261 · GitHub An Update on Composer & Packagist Supply Chain Security PHP Tek: A Homecoming by Ben Ramsey […]

Video version at: https://youtu.be/R_-NG_frTiw Last month, two developers on a team I was working with both merged their branches to main within minutes of each other. The first merge was fine but the the second introduced a conflict in a shared service class that nobody caught until the CI pipeline deployed a broken build to […]

🎙️ PHP Podcast – May 14, 2026 Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered: 🎙️ PHP Tek Is Four Days Away The countdown clock is basically ticking in real time — PHP Tek 2026 in Chicago is just four days and ten hours out […]