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Putting APIs to the Test

March 2026

Welcome to the March edition of PHP Architect. We are excited to share ideas that will make you think and may even change some of your current practices. While we publish a magazine, we are developers first. We are experiencing the AI wave that many of you are also dealing with. There are new questions, uncertainties, and even concerns. Our goal is to help all of us better understand this new world and provide the tools to implement AI-related changes while remaining relevant.

Learning Leadership at PHPTek/JSTek

By Scott Keck-Warren

Very early in my career, I became the lead break/fix technician in a small IT department. I didn’t get the role because I knew someone or played office politics well (because, for full transparency, I still don’t). I got it because I showed up with a positive attitude, could troubleshoot problems effectively, and genuinely cared about doing the work well. It felt like a natural progression, and I was proud of it. It’s a pattern that’s followed me throughout my career. Get an individual contributor position and eventually move into leadership. by Scott Keck-Warren

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

By Wendell Adriel

Welcome back to our journey into resilient PHP applications. In Part III, we focused on traffic resilience with **HAProxy** and saw how a healthy edge keeps bad nodes out of rotation. That only helps if the user can land on any healthy node and keep working. If their session lives on the server that just died, the infrastructure may be healthy while the user still experiences an outage. by Wendell Adriel

Building Perceptrons and Activation Functions in PHP

By Christopher Miller

Alright, so we’ve cleaned up our data, and now it’s time to start building the actual brains of our machine learning system. We’re talking about neural networks – the digital equivalent of brain cells that can learn, adapt, and make decisions. But before we build a full network, we need to understand the fundamental building block – the perceptron. by Christopher Miller

How A Dependency I Didn’t Know I Had Cost Me 44,000 Spam Emails

By Eric Mann

I woke up to an email no developer ever wants to see. AWS Support, subject line in bold – my SES account was under review. High bounce rate. Abuse reports. The kind of message that makes your stomach drop before your coffee’s even brewed. by Eric Mann

Grumpy Testing Patterns – How Do I Organize My Test Logic?

By Chris Hartjes

Hello friends, and welcome to another Yelling At Clouds column. I am continuing my series on testing patterns in the hopes of giving you the skills to recognize when a specific pattern will solve your problem. by Chris Hartjes

Designing APIs That Don’t Lie

By Steve McDougall

There’s a particular kind of pain that comes from inheriting an API where the documentation says one thing, the code does another, and the consumers have long since written their own internal notes to track the difference. You stop trusting the spec. You start reading the source directly. The documentation becomes decorative. by Steve McDougall

Embracing Our Post-AI World

By Edward Barnard

When you see an odd AI response, what caused that response? Is it a hallucination, or something else? A detective might call this “figuring out the motive.” Learning to reason from effect back to cause is an important skill for working alongside AI. This month, we learn this reasoning skill. Beginning next month, we will be practicing and gaining mastery of this skill. by Edward Barnard

Augmenting Valinor with Property Hooks

By Oscar Merida

Each release of PHP bring new capabilities to enhance our capabilities or reduce boilerplate code. PHP 8.4 introduced property hooks for handling getting and setting object properties without having to create a ton of getter and setter methods. This month, we’ll see how we can add these features to our Spacetraders client. First, we upgrade Valinor, update Docker to support PHP 8.4, learn how property hooks work, and then use Rector to automatically add them to value objects. by Oscar Merida

Understanding References and Copies in PHP

By Marian Pop

I spent hours debugging a problem that came down to a single character. A function was modifying an array that should have been unchanged. I checked everything from the function logic, the calling code, to the data itself. Everything looked correct. Finally, I spotted an ampersand in the foreach loop from code I’d written months earlier and forgotten about – hours for one character. by Marian Pop

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

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