February has a way of making us reflect. The shine of a brand-new year has settled into the rhythm of real work, the resolutions have met reality, and we’re left with one simple question: what are we actually building, and how are we building it? This month’s issue tackles that question from nearly every angle — from the future of PHP’s runtime and the rise of AI-assisted development to the fundamentals of testing, security, data, and architecture.
Alright, so we’ve covered the mathematical foundations and basic algorithms, but now comes the part that’ll probably take up most of your actual machine learning time – data preprocessing. It’s not the most glamorous part of the job, but here’s the thing – even the most sophisticated algorithm can’t work miracles with garbage data. As they say in the business, garbage in, garbage out. by Christopher Miller
One of the huge benefits of PHP is its “shared nothingness” architecture. A request comes in, PHP boots up, loads your framework, pulls in configuration, initializes services, handles the request, and then tears everything down. It is elegant in its simplicity and forgiving for developers because every request starts completely fresh with no shared state. However, it is also expensive in terms of CPU cycles, memory usage, and response time. by Scott Keck-Warren
Hello friends, it’s time once again for your (almost monthly) dose of a grumpy programmer yelling at clouds. In this month’s column, I continue talking about testing patterns. Since not everyone has read all the previous columns, let me reiterate what I am trying to do here. by Chris Hartjes
Hello again, everyone! I hope you’re enjoying our journey on learning how to create resilient PHP applications, and that you’re ready for the next part of our journey! In Part II, I showed a reference architecture for resilient PHP applications as a high-level overview. Now, we are going to start diving into more details of each part of that reference architecture, starting by talking about traffic resilience with **HAProxy**. Grab your coffee and let’s go! by Wendell Adriel
Now that the year has lost that “new year’s smell,” the too-ambitious gym memberships have been cancelled, and we’re back to reality, we need to remember that not every list is as transient as those hopeful annual resolutions. by Eric Mann
On February 11, 1934, a group of Army officers gathered at the Newark, New Jersey, airport for a demonstration of the Link Trainer. This was an airplane cockpit simulator that rolled, pitched, and spun on a turntable to simulate the flying experience. Today, 92 years later, we know all about flight simulators as video games. The Apollo astronauts trained in simulators built by the Link company. by Edward Barnard
Software is ultimately written for people, not just machines. A processor would be perfectly fine with assembly or machine code, but those of us with meat-space processors need abstractions, readable syntax, and organized source code to navigate and understand complex systems. This is where software architecture comes in and provides the structural framework to make sure our applications are reliable, effective, and maintainable over time. This month, we explore how architecture blends art and science to deal with the inevitable trade-offs every project must make. I’ll show the role of Architectural Decision Records for documenting the “why” behind key choices and then demonstrate how we can enforce these standards automatically using custom PHPStan rules and the PHPArkitect package. by Oscar Merida
Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Today’s AI coding assistants feel precisely like that—magic. But behind the illusion lies a fundamental shift in how we build software. This article examines how tools like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and emerging agentic frameworks are reshaping PHP development, from backend automation to the thorny questions of code ownership, comprehension, and what it means to be a developer when machines write code alongside us. by Abdulrafiu Izuafa
PHP has always had an awkward relationship with concurrency. For most of its history, the answer to “how do I do two things at once” was “you don’t.” Each request runs in isolation, does its work, and dies. Simple. Predictable. Limited. by Marian Pop
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