This is how PHP 8.6 lets you write a string transformation, with no closures and no temp variables. $name = ‘Scott Keck-Warren’; $fixed = $name |> str_replace(‘Scott’, ‘Alice’, ?) |> strtolower(…); // string(17) “alice keck-warren” var_dump($fixed); It’s going to be released November 19, and I’ll also show you a deprecation that’s almost certainly in […]

  Beta 1 for PHP 8.6 landed this week, and buried inside that routine-sounding milestone is the moment PHP’s next release mostly stops accepting new ideas. Not completely. But close enough that if you’ve been half-watching an RFC thread, wondering whether it would survive to actually ship, this is the week you find out. If […]

Video version: https://youtu.be/ubhVleOpLQ0 It’s so easy to ask an AI agent to build a feature, and have it hand you 5,000 lines of code. It might even feel like a win until you start reading it so see the same validation block in four controllers, the same database-fetch boilerplate in six models, and that efvery […]

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 […]

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 […]

When the Symfony team shipped UX 3.0 on April 13, 2026, they did something that major version bumps rarely do cleanly: they used the opportunity to remove things. Not just deprecated APIs, but entire packages that had quietly become dead weight over the 2.x cycle. The result is a leaner, more opinionated frontend toolkit that […]