Jim Seconde
A trained actor with a curious background: from Theatre Studies, to Q/A, to Business Intelligence development, to full stack web development, Jim the resident specialist PHP Developer Advocate at Global Cloud Communications giant Vonage. He founded Birmingham, UK’s current PHP usergroup BrumPHP, as well as being on the Fusion Meetup team. He mentors, writes and speaks on PHP, Javascript, DevOps, DevRel and tech culture. He also pretended to be a DJ on the way.
Articles
Supercharge Your Code with PEST Mutation Testing
By Jim Seconde
PEST has seen a decent amount of adoption, especially since it has become the de facto testing library for Laravel users, giving the option for Laravel developers to choose between PHPUnit or PEST, running PHPUnit under the hood. More choice can only be a good thing, but the adoption rates also mean a development lifecycle that has seen plenty of new features being shipped. by Jim Seconde
Published in Meet the new Executive Director of The PHP Foundation, April 2026
The Laravel AI Experience: Coding Basic RCS Functionality
By Jim Seconde
Everyone is talking about AI. With my usual cynical developer hat on, it took a long time to really embrace what was being offered. The early offerings, for example, had internet information cut-off dates. by Jim Seconde
Published in Putting APIs to the Test, March 2026
RCS Messaging with Laravel, Livewire, Reverb, and Echo
By Jim Seconde
Time to get our hands dirty with RCS and Laravel. by Jim Seconde
Published in Boo, It’s PHP!, October 2025
PHP is Legacy…in 2025
By Jim Seconde
> We travel in our jobs a lot at Vonage. I speak to plenty of developers from all walks of life, and I can confidently say one of the most asked questions I get is: Why do you still do PHP? Variations of this question can be “PHP supposed to be bad, right?” On several occasions, the person I spoke to did some PHP in 2012 or 2010 – I forget. For reasons I do not understand, we are going through another spate of this in online forums a lot, so more “PHP is terrible” comments are coming out of the woodwork. > >What causes this phenomenon? Why is PHP “bad”? by Jim Seconde
Published in The Golden Age, May 2025
PHP is Legacy…in 2025
By Jim Seconde
> We travel in our jobs a lot at Vonage. I speak to plenty of developers from all walks of life, and I can confidently say one of the most asked questions I get is: Why do you still do PHP? Variations of this question can be “PHP supposed to be bad, right?” On several occasions, the person I spoke to did some PHP in 2012 or 2010 – I forget. For reasons I do not understand, we are going through another spate of this in online forums a lot, so more “PHP is terrible” comments are coming out of the woodwork. > >What causes this phenomenon? Why is PHP “bad”? by Jim Seconde
Published in Knock It Out Of The PHPark, April 2025
