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December 2025

December is often a time of celebrations around the world. Various holidays are recognized depending on your region, culture, or religion. One thing that remains consistent during this time is our dedication to presenting you with high-quality PHP education through this publication. We value our wonderful PHP community and always welcome feedback on the information you receive here. Enjoy this month’s edition with a cup of holiday cheer, and a very happy holiday to you all.

Linear Algebra Fundamentals: Vectors and Matrices in PHP

By Christopher Miller

by Christopher Miller

Kubernetes: Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions

By Scott Keck-Warren

If you’ve spent any time working with anyone doing modern DevOps, you’ve probably heard them discuss Kubernetes. Kubernetes is one of those tools that has a very steep learning curve, but can be hugely beneficial if you have complex container setups or need to scale up or down dynamically. The steep learning curve makes it difficult for small teams to manage it, so you lose all the benefits because you typically can’t manage it without at least one dedicated person who has that kind of time to spare. by Scott Keck-Warren

A New Way to Write Applications

By Chris Tankersley

As I mentioned in the October 2025 issue of PHP Architect, FrankenPHP has emerged as a game-changing application server for PHP. With the PHP Foundation’s official support as of May 2025, it is becoming a cornerstone technology in the PHP ecosystem. While FrankenPHP can make deploying traditional PHP applications easier, it also introduces a new approach to building your application. This is called Worker Mode. by Chris Tankersley

From Downtime to Uptime: Building Resilient PHP Apps – Part I

By Wendell Adriel

Availability is a business capability, not just an infrastructure checkbox. It protects checkouts during traffic spikes and preserves user trust when third‑party APIs fail. by Wendell Adriel

Don’t Pipe That: A Cautionary Tale in Operational Security

By Eric Mann

It was a Wednesday morning when we sent the email. Twenty-three carefully crafted messages landed in the inboxes of engineers across our organization, each one appearing to come from IT support. The subject line was urgent but not alarming – Action Required – SSH Key Strength Validation. by Eric Mann

The Challenge

By Edward Barnard

STOP. Read this first. This article may look like historical research, but it is actually demonstrating how AI companies train Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Claude, a process that costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Every element in this article (book cover and aircraft photos) corresponds to elements in LLM training. The tables near the beginning show these correspondences. If you skip ahead thinking “this is just research methodology”, you will miss something that, to my knowledge, has never been explained this way before. by Edward Barnard

Better Issue Tracking

By Oscar Merida

I always wished issue tracking was someone else’s job. Issue tracking conjured up images of overhead and wasted time. A good issue tracker isn’t just busywork for project managers. It’s a critical component providing a historical record and coordinating required work. Experience taught me that writing a good bug ticket or feature request was key to setting myself up for success. Effective issue tracking improves developer productivity. Let’s explore the essential features for any issue system before we use GitHub’s issue tracking features to add custom forms for logging issues and enforcing branch naming convention. Instead of weighing your devs with a heavy process, we’ll see how we can keep it lightweight and effective. by Oscar Merida

End of Year Push

By Maxwell Ivey

It’s that time of year again, when online shopping will hit its peak. This time of year can be especially frustrating for consumers that use adaptive technology. by Maxwell Ivey

JMeter Performance Testing Tutorial for Beginners

By Deelaka Radheesh Abeygunawardena

JMeter is a widely used tool for performance testing in the software industry. It is especially suitable for learning performance testing and for testing small to medium-sized projects. JMeter provides key metrics such as response time, throughput, error rate, latency, and resource utilization to measure the performance of a system. In this article, we cover the basics of performance testing, what JMeter is, how to get started with JMeter, and its core elements. We also include a JMeter Performance Testing Demo with some useful tips for beginners. by Deelaka Radheesh Abeygunawardena

A Costly Lesson in Race Conditions in Laravel — and How to Avoid

By Dare Adewuyi

Race conditions: a little fox in a codebase that can easily be overlooked or ignored. The same codebase can lead to business failure due to losses arising from an attack in a financial app or at scale. This article will provide practical ways of making your app immune to race condition attacks. by Dare Adewuyi

How to Support Junior Developers: A Guide for Senior Engineers

By Christopher Miller

The Moment That Defines a Career – Picture the scene – you’re known as a developer, and someone you don’t know asks you a question – “Hey, Chris. I’m working on this bit of code. There’s something wrong here because I’m getting errors, but I don’t know why?” by Christopher Miller

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