The PHP Podcast 2026.01.08

This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John talk about Welcome to 2026, Denmark stops postal services, New Laravel employee, PHPTek Early Bird ending soon, the pains of making a living off open source, PHP is Back according to Nuno, and more…

Links from the show:

The PHP Podcast streams the recording of this podcast live, typically every Thursday at 3 PM PT. Come join us and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

X: https://x.com/phparch
Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com
Discord: https://discord.phparch.com

Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/

Host:

Eric Van Johnson

John Congdon

Streams:

Partner

This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners

Displace

Infrastructure Management, Simplified
Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease.
https://displace.tech/

PHPScore

Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore

CodeRabbit

CodeRabbit - cut code review time & bugs in half Instantly.

Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.

Honeybadger.io

Honeybadger helps you deploy with confidence and be your team’s DevOps hero by combining error, uptime, and performance monitoring in one simple platform. Check it out at honeybadger.io

Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Listen

Podcast (episodes): Play in new window | Download | Subscribe

Transcript

[05:16] Welcome to the official podcast of PHP Architect. Join us to listen to the latest news and tech talk from our conferences, the magazine, and wider PHP community.

[05:37] Hey, John. Hi. How are you? Long time no talk. Feels like I haven’t spoken to you in a year.

[05:47] 2026, baby.

[05:51] What are you doing, dog? Eating up my dog has just become a complete nuisance lately.

[05:59] Welcome back to the podcast. new year same old ugly people,

[06:09] slower start less formatted start yeah we’re kind of we’re kind of winging it in the new year, you know John and I decided not to wear pants today and so that’s not just today come on now,

[06:27] hammer stops right here.

[06:32] I want to say uh happy 2006 to our people in discord who 2006 you guys are back in the past 26 uh i saw i saw a busy uh busy pixel who for whatever reasons not in our discord uh on youtube and we got a woods uh jeffrey and of course the official male model php architect duck tizzle, speaking of YouTube if you’re listening to us now go over to YouTube over there youtube.com slash phbr hit subscribe, where is it it’s right there you forgot how fingers work I did too does that work yeah that works.

[07:23] And pop into our Discord. If you’re watching the live stream, you want to pop into our Discord at discord.phparch.com, be part of the community. It’s not only during the live stream. It’s the kind of thing we do all week. Although I’ve gotten terrible at keeping up with Discord, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I’m sure everybody’s done listening to me rant throughout the week. I get all my ranting in right now. But yeah, they hang on Discord and just have some of the greatest and coolest conversations. Yeah, it was all slow over the holidays, but that’s to be expected. Yeah. But yeah, how were your holidays, speaking of which? Man, they were great. My kids, it’s fun having kids during the holidays. I always forget we have like a global audience. So here in the US, we just had Christmas and New Year’s. I don’t know.

[08:27] Not celebrated anywhere else no i’m pretty sure new year’s is is you know specifically a u.s uh a celebration yeah yeah i’m sorry you were saying you have you have kids yeah having kids makes that time of year fun it’s minus the cost because it’s friggin expensive yeah especially as kids get older they want cooler things and it’s yeah they they got what they wanted and then some and my pocketbook my pocketbook feels it yeah yeah it’s not fun but you know continued working for the most part i i took off just christmas eve christmas day new year’s eve new year’s day and I do that for a very specific reason and that’s because for. Over a decade, I was forced to work Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, all the way through, especially when I was at my previous employer, because they had to count inventory. And it had to be accurate as of December 31st. And he was a strickler about, no, we’re counting it until it’s done on New Year’s

[09:49] Eve. and we were off in there until 2, 3 o’clock in the morning counting inventory and it was just a nightmare.

[09:57] The cool part was finally, like three or four years before I left, I’d built a whole inventory system in PHP on handheld scanners, which was really cool. And I was able to make it where we could start inventory like a week prior. And then it would keep the inventory up to date, So that we could finish very early on New Year’s Eve. All we had to do was spot check, verify things, and then call it a day. Cool. Yeah, you were probably the one working the most. Because we gave the team two weeks of gear down time. We’re not really time off. As a matter of fact, I don’t know if Frank even took. I think he just appreciated the fact that nobody else was working and just kept working. Or maybe I forgot to tell him and he just didn’t know.

[10:53] So that was cool. I think everybody popped on at one, at some point during the two weeks and did stuff. I kind of have, you know, was like watching Slack and email, but I have to say in those two weeks, I, there were like three or four days that I didn’t step foot in my office, which is a sounds silly, but it’s a big deal for me. It’s very rare that I don’t come into my office and do something. So I am, we enjoyed it. It was, it was, it made it harder to come back on Monday. This is our first week back, right? Yeah. Yeah. Wait, is it, is this our first week? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Monday was like, oh, this sucks. Wait. See, not me. I, I, I, I was just like, sometimes you just need like, work is a break like there’s a lot of family time which is great but at the same time it’s like kids you need to go back to school i need to get back to work i got stuff i need and it didn’t help that my younger kid all of a sudden sunday before going back to school

[12:05] on monday got strep throat so out of nowhere out of nowhere he’s like i don’t feel good starts vomiting and, complaining of a sore throat and not good.

[12:21] So he stayed home for three days. He finally went back to school today.

[12:26] Cool. Yeah, man. So it’s been fun. And pretty much the entire PAP ecosystem shut down. Because we weren’t here. We’re not working. Nobody else is going to do it. That’s not really completely true, I guess. We’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about on my board. That you do yeah uh what so go ahead i i wanted to go with the top one on your board because we finally made a decision on php tech early bird pricing so that was not top on my board but yes well i mean the card kind of reminded me so early bird is going to end the end of this month january 31st, early bird end, so if you’re considering going to BHP Tech or JS Tech now, purchase today. Make it easy on us. Let us know you’re going to be there. Make it easy on yourself save some money because once the prices go up they’re not coming back now. That’s right and for clarification it’s not now js tech it’s and js tech so it’s, but did i say now yeah uh so

[13:41] yeah yeah um that’s always kind of an interesting time of you know when do we actually stop early bird pricing because you know we we always want to keep it as cheap as we can as long as we can but we also have to pay bills so yeah uh speakers are up uh schedules are softly kind of probably 90 done um we’ll we’ll probably look at those a couple more times uh over the upcoming weeks and eventually post them but uh you you can see what talks are happening already if you just click on the speaker’s name their talks pop up and it’ll tell you so there are no we’re not hiding anything there’s no big reveal we’re just we just make sure everybody you know kind of gets a break between talks and everything so we like to look at the look at the schedule a couple times and like i said john and i have already gone through it once yeah and i’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around how we’re going to display

[14:41] the schedule because it’s really easy with session ice to throw up their javascript but we’re only They’re going to be able to show the PHP text stuff on PHP tech and the JavaScript on JS tech. I see what you’re saying. So they make it where we can hit an API, pull the stuff in, and then we can build our own schedule from both sets of data. It’s just going to be a little more of a pain in the ass. Yeah. Like we don’t have enough going on. Let’s, uh, let’s go ahead and do this. Oh yeah. I forgot that doesn’t, that doesn’t show you the split. Damn it. Alright, yeah. So, yeah, really kind of interested.

[15:26] It’s interesting to see the JS tech take form.

[15:32] I was very concerned about submissions and whether or not we would even get submissions. And we did. We got a lot of submissions. Enough where we were debating whether it’s going to be one track or two tracks. But ultimately, we settled on one track. so space wise for now yeah yeah that might change and we will see how see how successful it is um yeah i’m actually really pleased with the turnout of js tech so far, that’s been my past three weeks is scheduling all the flights for the speakers and i’m still not done and it’s it’s a nightmare it’s never easy it’s stressful trying to make sure everything lines up. The one I did this morning, he was coming from Rome and.

[16:24] The flights that came in on Monday were kind of wonky. So he’s like, I’ll come in Sunday if you want. So we start looking at flights on Sunday. And all of a sudden I realized, wait, the one we booked lands at two o’clock. Let me see if they have that same flight on Monday. And of course they do.

[16:44] So now I’m trying to frantically get in touch with the airline saying, hey, can we switch this?

[16:52] And that’s a pain because I don’t have access to that person’s email. They’re in Rome, completely different time zone.

[17:00] Luckily, because I was still online on the website and I was able to go through their live chat, they thought I was Mateo and were able to change the flight. So anything to save a little money. I mean, a hotel room is not cheap. Yeah. yeah um code so i you you work through the week uh the the two weeks you do anything any exciting coding um the most exciting thing i did wasn’t in php but it’s ai is freaking scary right dude it’s scary let’s all right we should yeah we’ll talk about that why why is it scary to you All right. So the latest thing I did was connect our phone system for a client to open AI. So I made it where you call a fake phone number through our system and it routes to open AI. And now you’re having a conversation with an AI agent. And the whole thing is around it’s. It’s a teaching about the application, you know, over here, you’re going to have this and here’s what we’re doing. And you can ask questions like,

[18:22] well, what does this button do? Interesting. I was about to say, so it’s not a recording. You’re interacting with, with AI agent. Right. So it started because we do that. We have these fake contacts. So when somebody is new to the system, they, they call a contact and it’s just a recording of somebody saying, hello. oh, I’m so-and-so, and I want to walk you through this part of the system, and here’s what this button does. And just trying to be engaging enough to keep you interested to see how things work. And we have six or seven of these contacts that you call through to learn different stuff. But when they set it up, for some reason, I wasn’t included in that decision, so they were hosting it on Twilio. So there’s an actual phone number. Somebody’s calling from our system through our phone system out to Twilio just to play a message and I’m like why are we doing this like why don’t we just take that,

[19:21] file the audio file and put it on our server and just play it mm-hmm, But those were already done. I let those go. But for the new application, we had to do something similar. And instead of me going out to Twilio and buying a number and doing all that, like, I’m going to do it my way. Came up with this fake phone number thing. So phone numbers starting with 999 don’t really exist. So they’re going to go through our local server.

[19:50] And Tim, Tim Lytle was like, that’s a great idea. I have another idea for that. What if we dial a phone number and it calls open AI?

[20:03] I’m Tim. Smart cookie. So how did, how did you train it? Like that’s always the thing I struggle with. Like I still don’t understand how you train these things. So it’s just a pre-written prompt. So just like you’re talking with chat GPT or any of the others, you prompt it, you give it all the background it needs. And then it’s just starts having a conversation and it’s scary fast.

[20:35] But but how does it know about the product like that’s what i don’t just just from the just from the prompt i mean it’s a long prompt of information about it and i mean it’s not it’s not the full product it’s a very specific niche piece of the product like right you’re in this part of the application and here’s what i’m going to teach you about so through the prompting your you tell the ai about it now it can somewhat regurgitate that to whoever it’s talking to that’s crazy man that is crazy yep yeah so the one thing i did do over the past two weeks is get like, do like a deeper dive into claude claude code and try to like i mean out of the box claude code was pretty fantastic. Then you add on top of it the stuff that Laravel did to feed into AI Engines, Claw being one of them, so that it has current documentations. In in patterns and things like that it’s gotten just so good but i’m like i feel like it

[21:50] could be better and i i spent a lot of time uh over the over the last two weeks trying to understand how to do that and how to make it stronger without overdoing because i i have a tendency of overdoing these things you know you know me with my plugins my extensions like oh yeah i want that oh yeah i with that and it just gets out of control um and i i hadn’t really gotten a chance to put to the test and then today we had a code base this morning where uh you know we need to do some upgrades to the framework um upgrades to filament upgrades to livewire upgrades to tailwind. And i didn’t have time to look at it at that particular moment i could have just done a composer upgrade and just upgrade the existing versions of all the packages that were in there. But I wanted to bring it. It was on like Laravel 11. I’m going to get some 12. And I know a live wire had some security patches come out that were really vital.

[22:53] So I’m like, okay, let me just throw my new cloud agent at this. And I’ll just check in every couple of minutes as I’m in my meetings and stuff and see where it’s at. And it did not only did it do everything, I had to, you know, go in there and correct. Like we went, we went like three or four rounds to get all the errors flushed out, which is huge. Like it usually takes a lot longer than that. And I’m like, all right, this can’t just work this well. And I deployed it. I tested everything local, all the tests I had written for that code base passed, tested everything local, and I’m like, I feel like I’m missing something, I’m going to go ahead and deploy it and see what happens. Totally expecting it to die. And I even told Joe at the time, who was working with me, I’m like, hey, I’m going to deploy this. So more likely than not, we’re going to have to do a rollback here somewhere. And it was also the first time I tested using the Forge version of zero downtime deployments.

[24:05] So that’s why we had been paying for Envoyer, because we wanted to be able to do zero downtime deployments. But that is now baked into Forge. So the only reason, the only real reason you’d want to use Envoyer now, today, is if your environment is on multiple servers. Forge doesn’t do that. But that wasn’t the case with this site. It was on one server. So Forge had a way for you to migrate your Envoyer configuration over to Forge. And I hadn’t actually had an opportunity to test that either. So I’m like, there’s so many ways this could go wrong. Fortunately, it wasn’t like this mission critical site. So had it totally busted. Yeah, you know, whatever. But no, everything worked like a charm. I was super excited about it. So, yeah, I tell you, man, AI, you know, it’s funny because I read an article from a CTO. It was like, you know, live coding is dead. And I guess I understood what he, in hindsight, I really kind of understood what he was saying.

[25:17] But when I read it, I was like very defensive at first. I’m like, wait, what? And it talks about how where AI lets you do things quickly, it introduced so many instability issues in your environment. It wasn’t worth the cost. I’m like, okay, so I have, I formulated very opinionated. I’ve gotten very opinionated on this, where it’s like, if you think AI is, is a, is a magic bullet, that’s going to make it so you don’t need developers anymore, then yeah, you’re going to, you’re going to fuck yourself. Right. Damn.

[26:04] So women use resolutions again this year was to curse yet less. And that’s going shitty.

[26:18] So, so. I guess we’re not doing the family friendly checkbox on this one. Not this one either. Nope. Not made for kids. So, yeah. And you’ve heard me probably parrot this a few times now. Now, I definitely see AI as a tool that should be in the hands of professionals who know how to do the work, right? And that’s where it shines. And I don’t know, I feel like, I didn’t get through the whole article, but I feel like the guy was sort of trying to make that same statement where it’s like, uh, you know, it’s, I think he was trying to say the same thing, just was taking a very long way around about saying it. And, uh, yeah. So I, I’ve, I’m really, especially me who I, I, I, I always have an issue committing to, um, to efforts that have a deadline because I get pulled in so many directions. I never know how much time I’m going to have to code at any one particular moment. And to be able to give an AI agent some prompts and say, hey,

[27:38] this is what I need out of this feature, and then go to a meeting, work on something else, and then come back later. And not have to figure out where I left off in my code base, what I was working on or anything, and just look at what the AI generated.

[27:55] I don’t know, man. I’m really starting to embrace that. And it’s getting to the point where I’m getting nervous. It’s like, I don’t want to not be a PHP developer, right? I don’t want to not be a developer. And I keep telling myself, no, that’s why we’re so good at using this tool is because we do understand. Like, I’ll tell it, you know, love it or hate it, I love the repository pattern, right? And I’ll tell the AI agent, you know, this is the feature I want. This is the pattern I want you to, you know, implement with it. And, you know, this is what I want there. This is what I want here. And I need value objects here. And, you know, I keep telling myself, I keep trying to convince myself, that’s why I’m still a PHP developer, Because I do understand all these principles and patterns and things. So I could be lying to myself. I don’t know.

[28:51] No, I was doing it yesterday with our PHP tech site because we realized it’s not accessible. And it’s on our mind. It’s just we have a million other things we’re working on. And unfortunately, that gets pushed to the bottom of the list. So I was like, I need to do something because I know a lot of it is add the ARIA tags, make sure you have alternate text on images and buttons. And so I was like, okay. Is grunt work for the most part so i was like i want you to follow the wcag. Um 2.0 specification and help me update the site and whatever tool i was using for getting a metric it went from i don’t know if it’s percent i know it went from 35 to 65 when it was done it was like a score of some some some score and i was like all right i made progress i’m happy with that for now and then i’ll come back to it later and try and do a little more but it’s like let’s just get something out let’s make it

[29:58] make it better i’m sick of hearing about it because i’m not hearing a ton about it but there’s one or two people that have mentioned it and it’s like all right let me work on that yeah yeah uh speaking of ai i mean while we’re on the topic we have we have a new partner we’re actually really excited about this one um something we have experiment experimented no experience with uh coderabbit.ai which if you’re not aware let me go ahead and share this with you guys instead of going directly there go to phpa.me slash coderabbit there you go phpa.me slash the coderabbit so this was one of those tools that i was so pleasantly surprised with. AI is being introduced and everything, and 90% of it is just crap. It’s basically just the old bots with a fancier name. And so when they talked about this AI service, CodeRabbit, for code base pull requests, I’m like, well, okay, initially pull requests, but,

[31:16] i’ll i’ll get into other other things uh when they talked about i’m like okay this is gonna be another one of those bots where it’s like oh this isn’t you know like i thought maybe it was gonna be like a php stand thing where oh this is not psr or whatever whatever dude this thing was. Smooth not only does it do a very comprehensive review of your code base and you know like when you open a pull request, the thing that blew me away is one of our developers in the pull request in GitHub responded to CodeRabbit. It’s like, oh, you know, I did this instead. And I’m like, Frank, what are you doing? It’s like, you’re responding to, like, it’s a bot. It’s not going to, and it responded back to Frank. It was like, oh, you’re absolutely right. I didn’t see that. You know, my apologies, but you still need to, you know, address this here. And like it allowed our, it allows our developers to engage with it and have

[32:19] like a back and forth, which is mind blowing.

[32:24] And it even has.

[32:27] It has a command line version, which I use. I actually use it in conjunction with Claude code. So when I have Claude do something, right before I’m done, I will say, then initiate this CodeRabbit process, look at its feedback, and respond accordingly to its feedback. Like if it sees something broken or something doesn’t look right and you agree with it, fix it. So that’s something like you can actually use it without even doing the PR. You just use it on your local system. I don’t know if there’s anything, I don’t know if there’s like a GUI for a desktop, but it does have command line versions, I’m pretty sure for all platforms. And it’s just so, so, so slick. Like I wish, this is something I wish I had when we were like individual developers, especially when we were really small, you know, and we didn’t have other people to do code reviews. This is a fantastic. So yeah, check them out. Coderabbit.ai or like John said, go to phpa.me forward slash Coderabbit today

[33:45] and sign up. You can try it for free. So thank you Coderabbit for partnering with us. Yeah. Thanks Coderabbit. You’re right.

[33:55] All right. Yeah. So that was pretty much it. We do have some fun things to talk about. Go ahead. We do. In Discord, Duck Nizzle earlier asked, do you guys host your apps in Docker containers or bare metal? And the truth is, it’s a combination of both. Some apps in Docker containers, some apps on bare metal. Most of our legacy stuff is bare metal or…

[34:22] Because we use Forge on a lot of our smaller things, it’s just a matter of throw it up there and it just throws it on the bare metal server versus throwing it in a Docker container. Yeah. But for our client work, I know for our biggest client, we do a lot of Docker containers. And for the the client code that i work on the main application the big one that’s paid the bills for years is still on ec2 instances but all the new stuff that is being written all the microservices are all in docker containers the deployment process has been kind of standardized amongst all of these things so that we’re all deploying our little microservices the same way,

[35:12] So starting to embrace that more and more. Yeah. Yeah. Fun stuff.

[35:20] Did you take a card off of my thing? Would I do that? I feel like you would. I did not take a card off of your thing. Well, dang it. I need to find something since we’re doing shout outs. Go ahead. Keep talking. I need to find something real fast. All right. You do that.

[35:42] Speaking of ai i something came across discord yeah i think it was discord yesterday day before, about tailwind css did you see that oh yeah you do that one thing you do have something on your board about that yeah do i what do i what do i have yeah yeah the morning walk i haven’t listened to that yet i want to it was hard to listen to man it was really hard to listen to but yeah let’s uh let’s let’s touch let’s touch on this because i mean this i i felt all his pain when he was talking about this so so if you don’t know tailwind css ended up letting go 75 of their workforce granted later i learned it was three people yeah but but i mean like yeah that’s still Like it’s a big number. Like our team is small. If we had to let go of 75%, that would suck. Yeah. Yeah. I’d hate to see you go, John. Yeah. Well, I trust me. I thought I was close to going the other day. Anyway. Um, but yeah, letting go of your workforce.

[36:55] When it’s not in your control sucks for us, it’s going to happen when our clients say we’re moving on to somebody else. We don’t, for whatever reason, at that point, unfortunately, that’s when you start letting people off, but they had to do it because of AI, right? Was that the reason? Not, not really the reason. So that was just kind of what sparked the frustration. So we’re talking about Adam Wavin, who is the creator of Tailwind. And I felt it was like a weird thing to begin with because it’s a CSS thing. Library right right the fact that you had employees was amazing right like you’re gonna you’re gonna build a business off this that’s and and they you know to to their credit they did a great job i mean they had the uh the tailwind uh components library you could subscribe to which again we did like we’re you know we we wanted to support adam and we were using tailwind and it was like

[38:08] yeah this will save us time. Now I have to come up with these components. You know, they did create services around the project to get income, which is how open source is supposed to work. You either create services or you make money, you know, consulting doing support or something. Yeah. So, yeah, that’s, that’s what they, that’s what they did. And I think it was just, that wasn’t bringing in enough money you know and they were trying to think of ways to to to do that and i think that a pull request or our conversation started up on a pull request or an issue or something about integrating ai stuff into it and i i think that adam was just you know not in a good headspace at the time got frustrated and say, listen. I’m trying to keep my company right now. I don’t have time to focus on this stuff. We don’t have time to focus on this stuff. And it’s like, Yeah, but it’s an open source project. So like, maybe you should say,

[39:22] we’re not going to do it, but you’re welcome. We accept PRs, you know, like, you know, you don’t discourage everybody from doing stuff, but, uh, well, it was on a pull request. It wasn’t even on an issue. It wasn’t like, it was a pull request. Okay. Right.

[39:39] Yeah. I think that is that what, where was your card at? You had that card. Yeah. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah, I think that was just like, again, just, just hit the wrong time. So here’s what was shared. And I feel bad for this guy because you know, he was trying to be helpful. He’s probably a huge supporter of Tailwind. He’s probably very excited to be using it. And, you know, he, he was just trying to be helpful. I’m sure. But, uh, let’s see if your goals are, wait, this is actually probably after all that. Yeah. That was after. you want to go to the top yeah yeah is it all your top up top yeah yeah. I assume so. Add LLMS.txt endpoints that serves as, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this was just somebody submitting a pull request to do this sort of thing. And to add LLMS.txt endpoint for LLM optimization documentation. So it seems like the work was actually even done already. And yeah yeah i

[40:54] just think it it was just bad timing um it’s it’s stressful and i i do think that’s one of the things adam touched on so i i uh there’s two links here the thing i shared earlier was a pot adam’s podcast where he’s very open and honest and transparent about this conversation And he even says, he’s like, you know, I’m, you know, I probably should have taken a moment before I replied, but, uh, but yeah, he does talk a lot about, you know, it’s a small business. He felt really bad. I mean, I think he is in the same position you and I are on, where it’s like, if we lost a company and it was just you and I who lost our, you know, the way we make our living, whatever, you know, we’ll, we’ll reboot, we’ll figure it out. I mean, I’m not saying whatever, I’m not saying like, it’s easy for us to clean new work, but he carried the burden of the fact that people he… Liked very much enjoyed working with felt were

[42:00] extremely talented that’s why he hired them are now looking for work and you know he just felt like that that’s just a big impact and like being a small business owner man it’s i i i appreciate it uh it’s just so stressful it’s such a stressful thing to have i think that’s kind of what keeps john and i pretty grounded fortunately but yeah yeah it was it was tough and again we’re talking about three people but like john said 75 of your of your workforce is three people and the stress that comes along with that running a business is hard enough as it is knowing that you are responsible for helping people put food on their table and then when you can’t and you actually take it away from them and like good luck find something else that’s right and and if you think about it it’s really more than three people right because because those three people are gone now adam who had kind of stepped away from the hands-on development

[43:06] in in code contribution part now has to get back into that meaning the higher management role. Of running the business making sure projects are being managed correctly setting priorities that’s now going to be more challenging for him to kind of do both so yeah it was three people but in reality it’s probably more like four four and a half people you know i i didn’t read through the entire uh comments in there somebody else replied saying. As someone who’s sponsored tailwind css in the past this is just a disappointing response would you like to disclose the fact that, sponsoring gives one access to an official collection of LLM rules so there’s already something there but you have to basically be a sponsor of the. Of the package to get access to it so now now there’s speculation was it because of the business thing or was it because of or was it because you want to make money off of it which if so is fine you’re running a business and that’s if

[44:15] that’s what you want to do just disclose and say hey, if you want this in the product sponsor us and you get access to it we’re not going to make it easy for you yeah and it’s it’s it’s always this fine line that um open source projects especially modern open source projects uh struggle with because everybody wants to make a living i mean we saw it we kind of see it a little bit with uh internals that’s why the foundation was was established because there’s a very clear need to have retention on these core developers of these projects yeah it’s great as open source it’s great anybody can contribute but you need that steady regular group of people who understand the history of it the direction of it the priorities of it yeah it’s tough man like i said i i feel for the guy i i don’t think he handled it.

[45:17] Exactly perfectly but i’m sure he did a much better job than i would have yeah we’ve all done that like a knee-jerk reaction you get upset you respond in the moment yeah and unfortunately when it’s online it’s they’re almost perpetually great this is where this is i struggle a little bit so he’s like i’m gonna lock this one it’s spiraling a bit appreciate the support from everyone we’re figuring it out and then he closed the the pr and merge i’m like well he did that originally like way up he closed it and then there’s a whole lot of conversation after like closing this is unacceptable or it’s against the spirit of OSS.

[46:03] I mean it’s a valid point so after so many comments of back and forth that’s why he locked he’s like you know this is it’s out of control there’s we’re not getting anywhere with it what’s done is done let’s move on he had to do it for his own his own sanity right yeah yeah. Having people come at you like that for an open source project and and let’s let’s be clear I mean, it’s easy to freak out about this sort of thing. Tailwind isn’t going anywhere. I’m sure Adam’s company isn’t going anywhere. He’s just, you know, readjusting, which is fine. I mean, as a matter of fact, I think I saw, where did I see it? I meant to bookmark that for the show. I think I saw somewhere. Oh, oh, shout out to our Discord. Again, discord.phbrch.com. So yeah, a lot of this conversation was in our Discord. And then somebody posted today that like google or or some some group at google is now a sponsor of tailwind i’m trying to scroll back really quick to see if i can find where that

[47:19] was but yeah i saw that i was like holy holy crap really i don’t even in general come on discord if you’re if you’re still around where’s oh here it is here it is i got it right here, boop let me uh share this with you guys open this up so he goes i’m happy to share that the that we google’s ai studio team are now sponsor of the tailwind css project honored to support and find ways to do more together to help the ecosystem. Of builders so yeah that’s nice yeah yeah so that’s kind of cool you know uh and and this is like always been the struggle with open source it’s like all these big companies depend on stuff like depend on these projects to continue to work but none of them want to contribute so much as a dying um to any of them i had i had one of the riskier arguments i think i’ve ever had as a young it person working in the enterprise with one of our management team about why if if we’re not going to contribute to these open source uh financially

[48:40] contribute to these open source projects we shouldn’t be using them and you know go ahead and give like i just couldn’t understand And I knew how much money we were giving to IBM for their WebSphere product. And it’s just like, we’re going to get, okay, so just keep doing that. Just keep tossing all this money over to these other companies. If you’re not going to even give a fraction of that money to an open source project that you’re using 10 times more than using their product, you know? It’s always been a point of just frustration for me. So yeah great to see this the nice thing is nowadays there’s many more ways to support open source whether it’s through GitHub sponsorship what’s the other one Patreon.

[49:33] There’s a few ways to support yeah so yeah so my hat tips to Google AI Studio good work guys yeah, Yeah, cool. Not a sponsor. Not a sponsor.

[49:52] But I wouldn’t mind talking to you about it.

[49:56] We have, speaking of Discord, let me bring this up too since I’ve already got my Twitter zoomed in. One of our Discord members and contributor to PHP Architect, Wendell, who just started a series on PHP Enterprise, which I was super excited to work with him and get that, is now working at Laravel. He is the Senior Software Engineer at Laravel PHP Open Source Team, which is just a crazy title to have. But yeah. So yeah, I don’t know if he’s in there right now, but he occasionally pops into our discord so if you know wendell uh give him a congrats congrats yeah that’s super super cool tell taylor to send you to php tech. Yeah right holy crap i’m slipping man i i think wendell if i’m not mistaken i could be totally wrong about this but i think wendell was actually the first purchase first patreon of the swag store out of the u.s so he bought our first uh if you’re wondering what i’m talking about i’m talking about store store.phparch.com.

[51:27] Which is right there. I do have, I still haven’t put anything else on since I created the beanie, but it’s just, I haven’t even ordered one yet. Cause I’m like, what is this? This is like way too big. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I’m pretty sure windows are our first purchaser of a product outside the U S which was nice. Um, nice from a sense that it was nice. We were able to send something outside the U S without having to worry about all the VAT in shipping. And, Oh, it was nice. He was able to buy it in the service. Just got it to them.

[52:05] You want to get mad at me?

[52:08] Let’s talk about getting mad at you. You want to get, you can get mad at me with, um, the fact that, Turns out fourth wall has a, a referral program that I didn’t, that I didn’t know about. And I got our local little league to set up a store and now they’re making sales through it. And I’m like, son of a bitch.

[52:32] Why did I do it? I’m like, I don’t know where you’re going with this, but okay. Yeah. Now I am that. Yeah. It was so funny. I, um, we talked about, talked about earlier.

[52:45] I joked about the fact that I was going to see how long it took John to piss me off in 2026, and it took a total of 48 hours. Was it that long? Yeah. Maybe not even 48 hours.

[53:01] You did it twice. I forget what the second thing was. But, yeah. It was… I’m joking. I mean, he just didn’t read my message. All right. I did read it, and I still… You still don’t see how you’re wrong. I understand. I understand. You’re wrong. So I got two cards here. I’m going to kind of combine. They’re not really related, but they’re kind of connected. And I’ll explain to you why here.

[53:35] So one thing I’m going to share, and again, this is not something that’s published through us. We have no skin in this game. but the author Pete said, Pete, I’m going to brutalize your last name.

[53:55] Hasloop, H-E-S-L-O-P, wrote a book called Laravel for the Rest of Us. And reached out to me a couple months back and said, hey, would you mind giving this a read and let me know your thoughts? And I’ll be honest with you, it was like the end of the year. And I’m like, I have read so many Laravel, how to get started books. I can’t right now. I’ll read this later. Because Laravel is always changing. And there’s always these new things. But I’m just like, I wasn’t super interested in it. And so when we got to the tail end of our break, I realized I hadn’t read it yet. So by this time, I think he sent me the message back in November. So now we’re in January. And so I messaged him. I’m like, hey, I’m super sorry. I didn’t mean to put this off. I will give this a read this week. And so I gave it a read. I’m actually pleasantly surprised. It’s a very interesting approach to this. So he wrote a magazine, he wrote a book that is meant for people who are not

[55:05] developers to explain to them the benefits of PHP and more specifically Laravel, what Laravel brings to the table. So let’s take it like you’re in an enterprise and you need to, you’re trying to convince your manager, your CTO, why you want to use the Laravel framework. But you only understand the Laravel jargon. And sometimes it’s hard to take a step back to see what the simple understanding of the benefits are. That’s where this book comes into play.

[55:41] Very interesting. I think it’s a very niche, a very small group of people who would be kind of, interested in using this or getting this, but it’s there. I mean, it is a resource there. It does a really good job. I basically listened to the whole thing. I even gave him some feedback on a few things. It is a long book. I mean, it’s not, it’s not short. I, it’s, I don’t even remember how many pages it is. I know it’s over a hundred pages. That just talks about all the different aspects of Laravel and why they’re significant without getting technical, without getting geeky development developer, you have to understand why this is a big deal sort of thing. He really lays it out. So if you think that’s something that you could leverage or it’s something that you think somebody else might need. The link will be in our show notes. Again, we get nothing out of this. I know him. He reached out to me. I don’t know him personally,

[56:47] but he had reached out to me, and I gave it a read, and yeah, I thought it was really good. So I will put this in the show notes for anybody who might need it. Now, kind of along that same lines, but different.

[57:03] You want to move that card over for me, John? Sure. New no did something i thought was very clever and started a site why php in 2026 now again this is one of these goofy things but like if you make if if you make money doing php especially if you if you’re not working for a single organization you understand the trouble you can have trying convinced, especially why PHP is different than it used to be, more importantly, but why PHP is relevant, probably more relevant today than it’s ever been. And this is an open source project. You can actually contribute to this if you want. But Nuno created this why PHP in 2026.

[57:58] Nuno works for Laravel. This is not Laravel specific, but of course, there was highlighted but yeah he he has symphony down here composer php stand pass php unit plate and even rector um just a really good very clean very easy to read or easy to look at uh website so again if you’re one of those people that likes to have the ammunition on you know what makes php so good and so worth having, this is one of those things. I am going to start including this little tag starting today. It’s already actually in the show notes. I already created the blog post. This will always be in the bottom of our show notes moving forward because I think it’s that important. So a big, I mean, we’ve had Nuno on the show before. I’ve had so many conversations with the guys, really one of the smartest people in our community. I love talking to him. Not only is he smart, but he’s excited. Like there, there are smart people who

[59:06] are great with PHP. And I like having conversations with them. And then there are people like Nuno that are smart, like having conversations with them, but they’re also excited about it. And they enjoy talking about the choice, enjoy sharing. And it’s just, he’s just one of the best people in our industry. So yeah, give it a look. I like it. I’m adding to, I’ll add to my not that it matters it’s easy to add to your GitHub readme yeah yeah yeah I saw that I haven’t done that yet.

[59:43] So might as well yeah why not,

[59:48] Where are we at? We’re right here. We’re right where we’re supposed to be. Hey, Sarah. Sarah is in Discord.

[01:00:01] You say I as she dogs on you.

[01:00:07] It’s Eric. Damn it. What did we say earlier? I’m the Rodney Dangerfield. Rodney Dangerfield of PHP. We were on a client call yesterday, or on Tuesday, and as usual, just giving Eric a hard time. The client is, and of course, I pile on as well, and Eric said that, and that stuck. Somebody else said something to him. I’m like, Eric, you really are the Rodney Dangerfield at PHP. No respect. No respect. 100%. Uh, for anybody interested, so we’re at four o’clock right now, which is about the time we typically, uh, wrap up. Um, but, uh, sometimes you run a little longer like today, obviously we’re going to run a little, little longer, not much longer, but because of that, um, merge PHP has their meetups a once a month, but it’s always on Thursday. And it had been at four o’clock and now they have pushed that to five o’clock not because of us because of other reasons i’m sure we weren’t even a consideration despite me being

[01:01:18] on the board but you know that’s why i never made the meet i told him like i don’t make the meetups because you guys do it right after our podcast and i’m doing you know show notes and stuff anyways they have pushed it back an hour so they they have a meetup today at five o’clock so if you want to hang out pacific uh after an hour from now yeah um hang out in her discord for a little while or whatever you you can get a double whammy of fantastic php knowledge and uh not only that but next month your very own john. Bailed on his talk is forcing one of the other pho architect team members to take his place bastard forcing yeah and i’m making him get up at 1 a.m his time to give the presentation it really is it’s chris who’s in london and it’s like one o’clock in the morning for him chris is like yeah no problem i’ll do that that’s next month that’s not that’s not today that’s uh that’s next month’s

[01:02:22] uh talk i was going to do it you were i i bowl on thursday night so i was actually going to take my laptop with me and do the presentation remotely oh i want you to do it again i want you that would be on you would be like the big little no no no a php no you have to no i was gonna do it in my car before going into the bowling alley i was gonna do it in the bowling alley i was good i was good because it would have been like why are you bowling you gotta do it while you’re bowling oh that’ll be fun that would be awesome i would watch that it’d be loud as hell no no no nobody wants that you wouldn’t be able to hear me it would not be fun i was basically just do the presentation be like sorry i can’t hang out i gotta go talking mcps today development with MCPs. Yeah. So thank you, Chris, for doing that. I will do a presentation later in the year, summertime, possibly when, There’s no, uh, no bowling going on unless you want to move it,

[01:03:25] unless you want to do it on a non Thursday.

[01:03:28] Yeah, no, we, we had to move our meetups because we typically would have our meetups on Thursday. How did we do that before when we, when we, when we had the other podcasts?

[01:03:41] We didn’t do it on Thursday night. It was usually like Tuesday night. Was it Tuesday? I think so. It was Thursday. Although I think when we did Ugly, we didn’t have a regular schedule initially. And then we did 9 p.m. for a long time. Oh, that’s right. Many years it was late. But it wasn’t on meetup nights.

[01:04:06] Speaking of, our meetup is we’re trying to get it scheduled. It’s going to be January 28th. We are looking at a new host. Did you see I emailed them, by the way? No, I didn’t actually.

[01:04:19] I may not have CC’d you. Of course you didn’t because I get no respect, that’s why. No respect.

[01:04:26] Yeah, if you’re in the San Diego area and you’re looking for… Oh, I did CC you. I am. Check it out.

[01:04:36] We’re actually looking for a presenter if you want to, if, if you, if you’re a San Diego area and you want to present, we’re looking for a presenter. And we’re looking at hosting at a brewery this, this month.

[01:04:50] Yeah. I have, I have, I have ideas. I want to, we need to talk after this. Shots. Do a drinking game. If you don’t, if you don’t volunteer.

[01:05:02] It’s beer, not a full bar.

[01:05:07] Okay i want to talk about one one last thing before because i i just want to get this off i’ve read that just before the show and it’s how awesome is that, oh shocking good or shocking bad shocking shocking like not good or bad interesting, so i hate i hate hate without supporting god damn it i wish i wish ns bucky it’s not going to be stone. No, no, it’s not going to be stone, but they will have, they will have beer and it will be in San Diego. So you should be able to make it. It’s not that bad. One of my, one of my things I hate the most as an American is mail because nobody sends mail anymore. All you get is junk and junk bills. Yeah. Junk bills and most bills are, are on like the, I don’t know what companies you deal with, but like I deal with companies now where they’re like, Oh, if you want us to keep mailing you a bill, we’ll have to, we’ll have to charge you extra. It’s like. Then don’t charge me extra just don’t send me the bill

[01:06:14] i get stupid stuff like from the main department of revenue and like yeah i gotta do it i hate and our mailman hates us so this is the first house i’ve ever lived in does your house have the mailbox on your house no it’s down at the street okay so this is the first time i’ve ever lived in a house where you had to go to like a communal mailbox to get your mail, which frustrates me because I pay taxes for the Postal Service. You keep raising the price of stamps, and yet you’re doing less work. I don’t get it. It pisses me off. And then the work you’re doing is for junk mail. I can’t stand it. I hate the mail. So anyways, Danish Postal Service has officially stopped delivering letters after 400 years. And I should share this. And yeah, after 400 years. So I’m moving to Dane. Denmark. I’m moving to Dane.

[01:07:24] I’m trying to keep a straight face. Yeah, Denmark.

[01:07:29] Yeah, so in Denmark, the Postal Service is not going to be a thing anymore. They are described as one of the most digitalized countries in the world. Yeah, I’ve heard that in this article. I wish it was at least an option where you could say, you know what, I’m opting out of all mail. Yeah. If I’ll take responsibility, don’t, I don’t need a mailbox anymore. I’ll even continue to be my character. Huh? You can just don’t check your mail. Just don’t go. That’s what I say. Oh, that’s, I didn’t even finish. I didn’t even finish my story. Jesus Christ, sir. So this is the first time I’ve ever lived in a house where it was a communal mailbox. Right. And so Beck and I are horrible about checking our mail because we know there’s nothing in there. And of course, you know, what we do get is the magazine, which I guess I shouldn’t knock it too much. I don’t know. I guess that just gets transferred to some other service.

[01:08:34] But we’ve gotten letters from our mailman on our front door that says, please empty your mailbox. I can’t put any more in there. I feel like responding, please stop putting mail in there. Yeah.

[01:08:56] Oh man it was so funny it’s happened twice now where it’s like just because,

[01:09:04] days go into weeks and next thing you know you haven’t checked your mail in like three weeks and the mailman is just like begging you to go empty your mailbox, please bring my mail to me put a mailbox on your door say put it in here.

[01:09:25] Oh man all right yeah um i think that’s it for me you have anything i should talk about no we’ve gotten rid of the penny so it’s not long before we get rid of mail yeah yeah yeah that well that’s that’s hasn’t officially started yet though has it or has it i think so pretty sure it started this year right they stopped minting pennies, i honestly like if i if if i’m in some weird situation where i have change my brain starts to break down like i don’t know what to do with change anymore yeah they stopped minting late 2025 yeah there we go yeah i i’ve been each penny costed more than three cents to make and again our taxes well you know we won’t see any savings but yeah no now you’re seeing in different businesses like there’s no penny so we’re rounding up to five cents yeah oh i’ve seen business where it’s like you know no cash yeah they have no way of taking cash which is weird but yeah i don’t know that that’s legal is it.

[01:10:39] I think because I see them all the time. I know I have too, but I think it’s legal. If you wanted, if you wanted to fight it, I think you could. Yeah. I feel like you should be able to. It’s like, yeah. Yeah. Anyways. Yep. Like I said, I don’t even carry my wallet anymore. I just carry my phone and do tap to base. I don’t even have my plastics with me anymore. Um, I, I like it because with the tap to pay, you’re not, it’s not the same credit card number. It’s not like, you know, it’s harder to steal your identity when you do that. So that’s why, that’s why I do it. And then we finally here in California, we’ve gotten the digital license, which is funny because like nobody recognizes it. Although I just see TSA. The last time we traveled, where do we go? It must have been Denver. No, it was Texas, wasn’t it? Oh, was it Texas? Yeah. Wherever it was. Yeah. It was like, oh, you know, if you have any digital license, TSA, we’ll use it.

[01:11:38] What annoys me is I had that on my phone, but it seems like every time I go to open it, it’s, you need to refresh it. Yeah. And the one time I needed to, it was like, I had no internet connection. Like, there was no way to refresh it. I’m like, luckily I have my wallet with me. This is stupid. Yeah.

[01:11:57] Yep all right cool not like just a picture of it on your phone well that’s the weird thing about it it’s like even to get to your picture it’s like it’s a couple taps it’s not like you just pull up a picture version of your license it’s like oh there’s there’s this barcode that they can scan and then if they really need to check your id you have to click another thing to actually pull up your face and it’s so weird that’s like uh did you did you hear one more thing before we go because you’re you’re you live here in california with me california did this big push for real ids right yep did you see uh that homeland security is saying now that the real id is not sufficient enough evidence that you’re you’re a citizen what or that the id is real i’m like what the why do we have these things then like what’s the point of it was a huge push oh it was massive As a matter of fact, now, uh, if you try to fly and you don’t have a real ID, they’re going to charge

[01:12:57] you an extra, like 45 or 50 bucks to process you. So it’s not now if there are other forms of ID in, in place of reality, you can have your passport. Um, I think what else passports one that always comes to mind for me because the kids have those, but yeah, it’s nuts, man. And the frustrating thing about, do you have a real ID? I do. I mean, it’s easy enough to do. It’s just a driver’s license. Yeah, I was going to say, the frustrating thing about it is here in California, I think it’s pretty much everywhere in the U.S. Now, to renew your license, it’s just like you just mail in a check, say, hey, I need to renew my license, and they send you a new license, right? But to get your real ID, you actually have to go back to the DMV and get your picture taken again. The DMV here in the U.S. is horrible. it’s such a horrible experience well every so often you have to go in anyway and i think i was my time to actually go in

[01:13:56] to renew it like oh so you just you’re fortunate yeah, the funny thing about mine and i don’t i don’t even have my license like my wallet isn’t even at my desk anymore it’s in my dresser the funny thing about mine is i have been growing my hair out for php tech and so like i got this big bear beard and all this long hair which i never have and like that’s on my license now for like the next 20 years.

[01:14:24] Uh real quick technical duck nizzle asks are you guys embracing pasky’s yet i was hesitant but chrome and safari syncing to multiple devices now seems like it’s time to accept them yeah uh yeah i i use them a lot but i don’t do it in chrome i do it in one password, Yeah. And there are definitely arguments about doing that and why it’s a bad idea, but yeah, I’m with John. It’s like, there’s, there’s, there’s a line of convenience and security and you need to figure out, you know, where you want to stand. You can have a lot of security with some convenience or a lot of convenience with little security. And we, we try to do a balance, but yeah, I, I love the, uh, the real, uh, I love the pasties. Yeah when when it’s an option i’ve been opting for my yubi key which i still have like i still have mine right here stuff like them yeah i you actually have i have to have mine to log into my mac, See, I was going to set mine up, but I can figure out how to set it up.

[01:15:28] It’s a process because you have to set up a pin and something else through the YubiKey manager. Oh, interesting. But I’d forgotten about, like I knew about it because my password is now a pin.

[01:15:42] But for the first time in a long time, I took my laptop out and worked in the kitchen yesterday and I go to log in and it’s asked for my pin. I just put it in. It’s like, nope. I’m like, oh yeah, I did type that in wrong. Let me try again. typed it in i’m pretty sure that’s it but i’m so used to doing it on my keypad and on the on the actual mac keyboard i had to do it across the numbers on top so i’m like let me go really slow it’s do do do do do nope that’s wrong and i’m like oh i bet i have to have it plugged in so i came in and grabbed my key and like yep that was it so the the reason and you might ask yourself why you would do that because your your macbook has a fingerprint reader the reason i was going to do it is because i was going i for a long time i had my uh clam uh shut and i honestly i would like that way so that i could uh yeah i keep it stored on the side of my computer with with it closed and

[01:16:40] i was wondering if um when you do that every time when the mac os would ask you to scan your fingerprint if the ub key becomes a substitute for that a dozen huh no so it just logs you into the actual mac and that’s it right yeah i don’t i don’t have the fingerprint nicety but I do use my watch for that. So when it works, it’s great, but it doesn’t always work. But for, yeah, you’re right. You do have the watch for that. Yeah. When I go to access one password, I can just double tap on my watch and it lets me in. Um, I Jeffrey. Yes. I do have the, the finger finger. Print sensor, but like Eric said, my laptop is against the wall back there. My YubiKey’s under my desk right here next to me. Nice and easy. Yeah. Yeah. And I know they make the Magic Keyboard with them built in. I never understood why they didn’t just make the device like that you could plug in and have somewhere. Oh, you can buy an external keyboard with the fingerprints?

[01:17:50] There’s there’s a yeah one of the apple magic keyboards have it has to be apple you know i don’t know anybody else has one but yeah which speaking of which my keyboard is killing me man so um you know i do that home row thing right where you know things up up here my l key will either double tap or not tap or sometimes tap correctly which when i’m typing is frustrating right because like i i go to type one l and it does two l’s or whatever but it’s also my shift key so if i press and hold it it’s my shift key now if it’s misbehaving i shift to hold it i’m trying to type another letter and i just get this line of l’s i’m like wait no wait no i’m holding you i’m holding you down stop and it’s breaking me man i i’ve got i’ve gotten so addicted to that And I hate, I need to figure out what’s going on with this Elkie. Time to pull the cap, clean it out, see what’s going on. I actually did that over the break. I pulled all the caps and cleaned the whole

[01:18:57] keyboard. That’s probably what busted it. I should have used so much pledge.

[01:19:06] Okay, that’s it. We’re going to be done. Yes, thanks again. Thank you. Thanks again to CodeRabbit for partnering with us and being a new partner of the show.

[01:19:19] Look forward to a long and happy relationship. Definitely. Okay, everybody. I hope you all had a good holiday. And I hope you’re ready for 2026 because it is shaping up to be a banger.

[01:19:34] That was a cute city. Bye. Bye.

[01:19:40] This has been PHP Podcast. The official podcast of PHP Architect. The industry’s leading tech magazine and publisher. focused on PHP and web development. Subscribe today at phparch.com to see what the leaders in the community and industry are talking about.

Air date	January 8, 2026
Hosted by	Eric Van Johnson, John Congdon
Guest(s)

The PHP Podcast 2026.01.08

Host:

Eric Van Johnson

John Congdon

Streams:

Partner

Displace

PHPScore

Honeybadger.io

Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

Listen

Transcript

Transcript

December 2025 Magazine Issue

Our Partners

About us

Policies & legal

Online Store

Special sections