For twenty-plus years, “deploying PHP” meant the same uneasy triangle: Apache or Nginx in front, PHP-FPM behind, and a configuration file glued between them that nobody on the team really understood. FrankenPHP is the first genuinely different answer that stack has had in a long time, and after a couple of years of steady releases […]

Caleb Porzio shipped Livewire v4 in January 2026, and it’s not a minor bump. The release introduces islands architecture, single-file components as the default format, scoped styles, built-in drag-and-drop sorting, and a suite of optimistic UI directives that make your interfaces feel instant. If you’ve been building with Livewire v3, the upgrade path is smooth […]

Video version: https://youtu.be/uVKXmqYVjpQ One of the more powerful features of AI-assisted development is that you can put multiple AI coding agents to work simultaneously with little effort. For example, you might have one building a new feature, one cleaning up an old API endpoint, and a third drafting a blog post. If the agents share […]

Recursive CTEs in MySQL let you query trees, org charts, and nested categories in a single query. Here’s how to use them effectively with PHP. Every PHP developer eventually hits the “tree problem.” You have categories with subcategories, employees with managers, comments with replies, or menu items with children — and you need to query […]

Terminal UIs have had a quiet renaissance in the developer tools world. From Lazygit to btop, the era of the ugly text-only CLI is giving way to rich, interactive interfaces built entirely in the terminal. PHP developers have historically been left out of this movement — our CLI tooling was functional but rarely beautiful. That […]

MySQL’s JSON column type has been around since version 5.7, but it’s one of those features where the gap between “I know it exists” and “I know when and how to use it well” is surprisingly wide. Used correctly, JSON columns give you schema flexibility exactly where you need it. Used poorly, they become a […]

If you’ve been hearing about Claude Code but assumed it’s mostly for the JavaScript and Python crowd, it’s time to take another look. Claude Code is a command-line AI coding tool that works directly in your terminal, and it’s remarkably effective for PHP development. Whether you’re building with Laravel, Symfony, or vanilla PHP, there are […]

I have been using Asterisk for many, many years. Today I release some new code, and upon code release we automatically update Asterisk to the latest version. All of a sudden, I started getting reports from customer service letting me know that recording voice mails was no longer working. I started looking into it and […]