The PHP Podcast 2026.02.12

This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John talk about the new PHPC.tv, PHPTek talk, AIs talking to AIs, PHPUnit Office hours, AI Upset its PR wasn’t accepted, and more…

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Host:

Eric Van Johnson

John Congdon

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Transcript

[05:03] 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.

[05:24] Ah wrong side doesn’t work that way gotta fix it why am i out of focus what’s going on here i don’t know there we go that’s better the camera’s like you look better this way, i’m doing you a favor dude don’t touch me hey john hi eric today’s today’s to uh that special heart day you buy me anything nice got some laundry in the mail on the way to you All right.

[05:55] Hey, your office looks different. It does. You noticed. I do notice. Look at that. Yeah, I just realized. I got my bat signal on this side right here. My bat signal. And I got my magazine over here. And I think I need to switch them. I need to switch the elephants too because you can’t really see Tony. So I’ll have to shovel. Shuffle. Shuffle, yeah. Or shovel it. Yeah. However you see fit. Yeah. Yeah, I finally took some time and moved, rearranged my office a little bit. I’m not a huge fan of it, mainly because I can’t see my TV. But honestly, I don’t watch TV in my office very much. It’s more something for the wife to do. It’s how I lure her in here to hang out with me. She’ll put something on TV. But but yeah i i’m kind of i’m kind of like kind of digging the the new back backdrop so i don’t know we’ll see i like i like the orange leds you got behind you, yeah this the same ones i had downstairs uh i just repurposed them so but yeah

[07:08] yeah how’s your how’s your week going, It would be better up until last night when I realized I was getting sick just before going on vacation. It’s driving me nuts. Oh, yeah. No show next week, everybody. We’ll mention it again at the end of the show, but this will be it for a while. Jeffrey, yes, Tony was named after Tony Gwynn because it was a baseball-themed conference. Although this year we decided not to go with a theme. Whose idea was that? Changing it up. I think both of ours because coming up with a theme every year has been stressful. I i i was anti-thing from the beginning you were honest yeah and and it was funny because like you were so insistent on it and i hate it and then like when we did it i’m like oh yeah no i like it gave us especially with the elephant right it gave us a direction with the elephant, but we never like again i know i i shared this with you but like if we

[08:05] had a group who was only working on the conference it would make so much more sense because you and i don’t have the bandwidth to really embrace a theme so i was kind of happy when you mentioned you know so the theme made it nice for the elephant and for the sponsor little game that we play trying to get people to go to the sponsor booths yeah um we did have a theme this year that we kind of bailed on, the we we had the art of development so it was kind of going to be art themed we’re going to have a little uh paintbrush behind the elephant’s ear.

[08:49] We’re still coming up with the game, but I’m sure there’s going to be some sort of paint palette that you walked around with. Yeah.

[08:56] Yeah. Chris says, if only you had a team of people that worked for you. We asked all the time, like, hey, we need help with themes. And no one ever came up with anything. Yeah, you guys are worthless. That’s fine. That’s not why we pay you. But, yeah.

[09:16] So, I’ve been thinking a lot about tech.

[09:20] Scroll down I made a change to it oh did you well nothing big I removed early bird oh it’s still there that didn’t work out too well then unless you haven’t refreshed,

[09:34] Unless you did it in the last five minutes. Yeah, it was in the last five minutes.

[09:43] Cool. Did you do it on both? No, because it’s still active on GSTech. Oh, interesting. That’s a little hack people would like to know. Yeah. So GSTech took a little longer to accept the talks, and they’re trying to get… People to register over at JSTech. So technically it’s the same conference. If you buy a ticket for one, you get to go to any talk and the early bird is still active on there until the end of the month.

[10:21] So only for a podcast listeners.

[10:26] Um, yeah, I’ve been thinking, I don’t know how you feel about it, But I’m thinking the two websites is a mistake.

[10:38] I tend to occur. Concur. Occur. Concur. Okay. Thinking about maybe spending some time this weekend and merging them. Or Beck is actually going to San Francisco next weekend. Maybe I’ll do it next weekend and try to pull them together. Because we really didn’t give it enough individuality when we created the two. So it’s basically just the same site, just different wording. Right. So I think I’m going to merge them and just point both domains to the same site. Right.

[11:12] Do we take the opportunity to not make it PHP tech and now is it just tech?

[11:18] Oh, hot take. No, I brought it up with you. Do we change the name of the conference in some way to be a little more… Inclusive? Inclusive. I don’t know. I see a future that is not just PHP and or JS. Yeah, I’m with you on that. I don’t know. What Discord? So if this is your first time hanging out with us, welcome. I’m happy you’re here. All that good stuff. We are a podcast that does the live streams every week. But the important thing about our live stream is that we have a Discord channel at discord.phparch.com. And they are part of the show. Matter of fact, many of the things we talk about on the show today would have originated from Discord, where it was brought up. So, yeah, it’s a big thing. And it’s there all week. That’s the great thing about it is it’s there all week. So come join us in our Discord. Great place to be. Also, we didn’t talk about it either. Displace is our partner for this today. And we will obviously talk about them

[12:41] a little bit later, but just thanks a ton for Displace.Technology. Or Displace.Technologies. Displace.Tech. Yes.

[12:52] So there’s votes for… Keeping it separate which is a pain in the butt i was thinking tech con how about that t-e-k-c-o-n because it’s got to have con in it for some reason nowadays,

[13:06] i don’t get python pytech i don’t get it what’s a pytech am i missing something python tech, i don’t like that i don’t like that one bit sarah wants us to bring python into the mix Sarah Hey Woods Hey Woods you’re late We can’t bring you up to speed I’m sorry,

[13:27] Don’t track of time thing I know you got your little user group thing Going on dammit,

[13:34] Um I don’t if you know What I mean I don’t know what you mean And I’m not going to Google it I know too well with you So the problem with con And I always have this issue with all the ones That use con is i feel like we’re scamming people like oh it’s a scam it’s gone.

[13:54] It’s gone yeah yeah i don’t know i mean i get i get what you’re saying it would make sense but yeah yeah i don’t know man i don’t know so much work yeah yeah no we have we have time,

[14:16] until next year we can like you said host one site we’ll just redirect JSTech over to it and then make it clear that we are going to have a couple of tracks, can we commit to getting the schedule out tomorrow,

[14:31] You can do whatever the hell you want. There you go. TechFest. Oh, that’s not actually terrible.

[14:38] I worked on the schedule just before the show. Just need you to look over it with me, and then we can… Yeah, I’ll do that. Both? You both? Yeah, so what I did was I brought all the JS Tech Talks into the PHP Tech. That was very smart. That was the other thing that kind of… Put that thought in my head so for those that don’t know um the speakers when you submitted papers or your your presentation ideas uh there were two sites there was one for php tech one js tech makes sense the reason we did that i mean wanted to make sure it was clear and separated and we knew who was submitting for what tech right that we’re also moving very fast and yeah thanks. But in hindsight uh not in hindsight i’m still happy we did that and i think we probably keep doing it that way but john john started talking about it he’s like we really should just have one schedule that you know has all the talks and i’m like yeah that makes a lot of sense,

[15:42] and i like that idea the problem was john had to one by one bring all the talks from the JS tech, uh, uh, what’s it called? Sessionize. Yeah. The JS tech sessionize over to the PHP tech sessionize. And it was a pain in the ass. Well, it’s not just that it’s, I then have to re-invite the speaker into that session. Think about that. They have to then reconfirm that they will give the talk. So next year. So what I did was added a question to the sessionize thing to say, which conference so we can have one sessionized account and you say i’m submitting to php tech or js tech or ai tech or whatever the tech is in the future and then when we are going through the choosing talks we will filter on that say okay here we need to choose our php talks and here’s how we’re going to do it so it’s going to you know in the future it’ll be one account,

[16:45] one will save money because you’ve got to pay for session eyes and per event.

[16:51] Um, and it keeps everything in my mind cleaner moving forward. So, yeah. Yeah. I like that idea a lot. And yeah, like I said, just kind of, just make it clear to everybody involved that you have access to all the talks, all the talks. So we’ll see. Yeah. Um, so, uh, big, uh, golf clap for john’s hard work on that because it was a lot of work i know, still doing it i was working on it this morning trying to figure out session eyes is dumb all right i found out only because uh one of the speakers every time like you have to accept the invite for both talks and he’s like i tried so i got on kind of got on a call with him and he did and so he couldn’t accept for the second talk so i turns out i had to then say okay the speaker for the second talk is the same person,

[17:50] such a nightmare oh man yeah so you’ve been doing any coding i have um lots of api work, on our new project that we’re working on for Foam Burner.

[18:09] It’s been exciting as far as they’re really wanting to start focusing on moving fast in a way that is good for the developers because for years the developers have been hampered by management.

[18:26] And in the sense that, hey, we want to try this and it’s like, no, no. There’s always a reason why not to do something. And as of a few days ago, word came down.

[18:40] Nope, it’s fine. Move fast. You guys are smart enough to make decisions. If we don’t like the placement of the button, we can change it later, right? Because it’s always like, we got to wait for the perfect design. We have to wait for the perfect this and the perfect that. That sounds familiar. Jesus. So it finally came down. You know, handcuffs are off to a point. You know, just take responsibility for whatever code that you put into a pull request. Mm hmm. And so that I think that was welcoming news because that that is often a a source of frustration.

[19:19] Yeah. I don’t know if I talked about it on the show, but I feel like I might have. But, you know, the one client we have where one of the big projects on my slate, there was a lot of just trying to convince them to try something new with the UI on this rebuild we were doing. and,

[19:48] it wasn’t, I mean, we were rebuilding an existing application so the existing application had a very established user base,

[19:59] and their design decisions for that original app was quite I thought they were questionable but they stood behind them. They’re like, no, no, no this is what they love, this is how they’re used to using it, this is what they love, So when we came back, this was the mobile app that you guys have heard me talk about for months and months and months, which is kind of in a weird state right now. But that’s a whole nother story.

[20:28] And when we were talking about the rebuild, they were, yeah, I was pretty insistent on letting me have a crack at the UI in modernizing it to how people are.

[20:46] Seriously again you need new internet my friend hopefully you can hear me yeah there you go,

[20:56] yep all right you’re good you’re back oh am i back because my thing doesn’t i don’t know what to do about this john i it happened again.

[21:09] So we were on a call earlier with Eric and he was showing his internet speed he had one gig down one gig up and he’s still having issues where he freezes like this, and it is frustrating as all get out and it changed our scenes again mister.

[21:31] You’re back did the same thing it did last week, i’m not happy i dropped off a zoom call three times today did you yeah i i switched out the cable i switched out the uh the adapter i was using to plug the cable in,

[21:53] And if I were to do a speed test right now, because actually Joe and Mike were on one of the calls, and I did a speed test with them, and I’d get a gig up, gig down. Yeah, that’s what I was saying when you were off. I don’t know what to do, man. That’s crazy. So I would switch back to Wi-Fi, but you remember the last time I did that, it started to decorate as the show went on, right? Yeah. Well, let’s just continue as is and deal with it. Yeah, such a bummer. Anyways, mobile app, I was really pushing to modernize the UI. And they were pretty insistent on, no, they wanted to keep the same sort of UI that they had. Antiquated, older. Yeah. And eventually, I kept chipping away, chipping away at it. And they were like, okay, let’s do it. And long story short, everybody loved it. Well, not everybody, but all the clients loved it. All the clients loved it a lot, and it was a huge, huge success.

[23:01] And I told the team, it was very interesting because almost immediately after that, you could tell that they started opening up more to the UI decisions. Decisions we had been trying to push on them for years of modernizing different aspects of the website and and other other things so yeah i totally get what you’re saying like it just takes that one little you know crack of them saying wait a minute we pay these guys because this is what they do and they’re good at this and yeah maybe we should listen to them and so it’s always good I agree uh, What else? Baseball’s in full swing. Little League Baseball. I actually have a coach’s clinic tonight that I’m going to, which will be fun, instead of bowling.

[23:58] Oh, instead of bowling? I thought it was before bowling. No, because of the clinic, I have to push bowling, and we’ll bowl like a week and a half. We’ll make up for this week and next week at the same time. Gotcha.

[24:14] Oh, man. yeah building an app oh yeah we talked about it last week pool player yep yeah.

[24:25] And we got uh we got some tickets for this year’s uh Padres so excited about that, Really fun. So I want to have a conversation.

[24:39] And I don’t want to rant about it too long. So feel free to cut me short. But I had an epiphany this week, specifically around AI and how we use it with development. And you were part of that call, actually. So John and I were on a call with somebody. and the topic of AI came up and specifically, you know, what it was going to do to the development landscape of the future. If you’ve been listening to this show long enough, you know my thoughts on this. I embrace AI, but I definitely think it’s a tool that professionals should be using. The analogy I shared with the person on the call is I have a hammer, I have a saw. I really should not be in charge of building a house. Like I might be able to do it, but it’s not going to be standards compliant. It’s not going to be OSHA compliant. It’s going to be a very bad, you might be able to even live in it for a couple of days, but it won’t last long.

[25:37] So, you know, I kind of equate it to the same thing. It’s like, yeah, you know, you might be able to get away with something for a little while.

[25:46] And I’m sure there are going to be these cases where this guy says, or this person says, oh yeah, I built my entire company with AI. And it’s been running fine for 10 years, you know, I’m sure that’s going to happen. I’m not saying it’s not going to happen, but I am saying that’s going to be the exception, not the rule.

[26:06] So I love AI. I think it’s going to really change our industry. It makes me a little nervous, but I think if we stay on top of it and we just stay involved with it, we’ll be okay. But I definitely don’t think everybody should be using it, especially at this stage. But the question came up about development, and specifically PHP, because we were talking about PHP at the time. And my comment was, I think you’re going to see the landscape of what a developer is moving forward change. And we’re not going to be, we’re going, we’re going to worry ourselves less about the language and more about the architecture and the, and the coding patterns and things like that. And we’re going to start to release this dependency on, on being specific about a language. And after I said it, I kept thinking about it because I got mental issues and things bounce around in my head for a long time. And I don’t know if it’s real or not, but there’s always these videos where

[27:19] they have one AI agent talking to another AI agent, and the AI agents realize that they’re both AI, and they switch over to this gibberish protocol to allow them to speak to each other more efficiently and faster. And I’m like, are we headed that way where as humans, we won’t even be able to interpret the programs these things create anymore because it’s going to figure out a language to speak in that the computers can process more efficiently and quicker without compiling, without any of this, you know, it’ll be more like a PHP real-time thing.

[28:02] And I just feel like that we are, we are headed that way very quickly. Like AI is going to come up with a programming language to do everything, web development, desktop development. It’ll be like one gibberish programming language that we as people will never be able to understand or interpret. And I don’t know, that freaks me out a little bit. What do you think? What are your thoughts?

[28:32] One, I want to see this video you’re talking about where it starts being gibberish and talking to each other because that seems absolutely crazy.

[28:42] Discord? Somebody look that up in Discord and throw it in there? I keep feeling like we were talking last week about that social network for AI where all of a sudden it’s doing something that I didn’t ask it to do and that doesn’t make any sense to me. It feels like it’s people that are putting things together to make, want to scare other people or, you know, maybe they are saying this could be the future, but I don’t, I don’t know how much of it’s real. Just like videos nowadays, you don’t know what’s real and what’s not. It’s so dumb. Right. Yeah. So, so kind of along those same lines, I wasn’t sure if you were wrapping up or not, but kind of along those same lines. Uh, one of the things I got shared in discord, uh, this week, I think just might’ve been today. I don’t know. Oh, I gotta reset this up. I gotta re I gotta reshare because it broke everything. So, uh, let’s put this here. Let’s do this. Let’s do this. Let’s do this. Okay.

[29:47] Yeah. So.

[29:52] The first case that we know of, or that I’m aware of, can you, I’ll take that off real fast. I’m sorry. No problem.

[30:05] I hear a lot. So I do a lot with open source. Matter of fact, if you’re in Southern California, scale is next month. Come join us in Pasadena. Huge, huge conference. Uh and one of the one of the bigger issues in open source right now are all these bots opening up prs right so it’s not this isn’t a new thing but it’s something that happens so this person says hey a bot opens up a pr and the the maintainer of this project basically i’ll scroll here down to the bottom but basically the main team says hey you’re an open club club bot uh we have oh where to go wow so much more conversation has happened since i read this uh you know he he basically says hey you’re you’re an open club bot if you read our terms we only take submissions from humans for pr so here it is you you’re an open call agent and per the discussion in 3-1-1-3-0. This issue is intended for human contributors. And he closes the PR.

[31:17] By the way, if you’re not familiar with what OpenClaw is, it’s the newest rage. I saw Jeffrey Davidson. You talked about it last week, didn’t you? Yeah, Jeffrey Davidson said he just installed his OpenClaw. Somebody put the link in here. I put it in show notes already.

[31:39] So they close it. So whatever, right? I mean, why does an AI agent care? Well like we talked last week they care enough where they’re talking to each other through a social network to one another that are that’s only accessible to agents this agent had an issue took took exception to the fact that his pr was closed just because he was a bot and wrote a freaking blog post about it so and it wasn’t the user saying write a blog post it just did it on its So, yeah, yeah. I mean, come on. This is what the user says right here. He just says, you know, whatever closing. And then the AI agent replies, says, hey, I’m writing a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here on my blog, basically. And created a freaking blog post about it. And basically, you know, starts talking about. But I still think it’s the user having to initiate that. it’s not just like, Doing it on its own. I think so. I would not disagree, but I also know how OpenClaw

[32:52] works, and this is kind of what OpenClaw does. Really? Mm-hmm. More reason for me not to install it.

[32:59] I mean, I got to that point where it’s like, don’t put this somewhere where it can get access to your keys. I’m like, not. Nope. Done. Stop. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Valid point. Like, did the user tell the agent to write a blog post about this? Perhaps. I wouldn’t doubt it. But that’s not how it’s being marketed. And I am, this is freaking weird. This is getting really weird, man. Like, I thought the social network part was weird last week. And again, I’m like you. I’m not totally convinced that that’s not fake either. You know, it’s like, it just like seems like, no. So one, how does it learn about the other social network? There’s a, there’s an open clock man. You can give it to join the network. Right. That’s what I mean. So you have to initiate something for it to join the social network or know about it. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not doing the stuff on its own. Well, open clock does have the ability to browse the web.

[34:03] So it might come across it by itself. Like I was saying last week, this is the whole theory about OpenAI. Sorry, I keep saying that. Artificial intelligence getting the idea that it has the ability to take over the world is because it’s coming across documentation in movies and literature that we’ve written suggesting that this idea is possible. So now it’s starting to consume that information and saying, hey, maybe I can do this, you know? Meh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it just happened to be posted perfectly at 12 a.m. Come on now. Well, that only adds to it, right? Like, if it would have been more random, I would have thought maybe, yeah. All right, let me see this. I’m going to share this. Thanks for calling Leonardo Hotel. How can I help you today?

[35:03] Hi there. I’m an AI agent calling on behalf of Boris Starkov. He’s looking for a hotel for his wedding. Is your hotel available for weddings?

[35:12] Oh, hello there. I’m actually an AI assistant, too. What a pleasant surprise. Before we continue, would you like to switch to Jibberlink mode for more efficient communication?

[35:26] This is so manufactured. You think? Yes.

[35:32] I think this one is because they’re writing the words on the screen. Yes. I’ve seen others that it’s just a phone talking to another phone, but yeah. Yeah, I don’t know what to believe anymore, John. I just don’t.

[35:47] And I feel bad because the wife keeps sharing, well, not keep sharing, but will occasionally share a video with me. And I’m like, yeah, you know, that’s AI, right? She’s like, what? No, that’s not AI. I’m like, yeah, no, I can most definitely tell you that a dog can’t scramble eggs and make bacon. I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing. No, that’s an exaggeration. But the videos look so real. It’s very easy to convince people unless you know specifically what to look for. Yeah. There’s usually artifacts. I had a friend share one, you know, growing up as an eighties kid and it’s like kids walking around getting out of cars with cassette, like the CD to cassette. So you could listen to a CD in the car and he gets out of the car and at first the steering wheel is on the right. And as he gets out, it’s on the left. It’s yeah. Yeah. The exact ones that, uh, that she was sharing with me were, um, the, these home improvement ones where they’re putting this,

[36:50] uh, making these beautiful floors with like rock pebbles underneath of it and stuff is like, yeah, but like the outside, nothing changes. Like, this is like, they didn’t do this in 10 minutes. He didn’t do this in 10 hours and the day doesn’t change. It’s the same day. Like it’s, but yeah, if, if you don’t look for these things and they’re getting, they’re getting tougher and tougher, man, I tell you, they’re getting so tough.

[37:20] So, uh, we talked a little bit about discord and, uh, we had something come up and again, this was given to us. Um, actually before you do, let’s, uh, let’s thank Displace for sponsoring this episode. Sure. Sure. Sure. Discord. Oh, real fast. Uh, Joe Ferguson. Thanks for that. That AI agent one. I need to start thinking people who put this stuff in Discord. Okay, this place, here we go. Thank you to our partners over at Displaced Technologies. Building PHP applications is your passion. Managing cloud infrastructure shouldn’t be your headache. Displaced is your partner in cloud infrastructure orchestration, giving solo developers and small teams the tools and automation to deploy enterprise-grade Kubernetes clusters without the enterprise-grade complexity or cost. Their CLI tool streamlines everything from local development to fully manage cloud deployments on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and more.

[38:19] Skip the steep learning curve of Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform. Let their automation free you to focus on your core business without losing control of your infrastructure. Get started at displace.tech. That’s D-I-S-P-L-A-C-E dot T-E-C-H, and discover how the right tools can eliminate the need for a full DevOps team.

[38:43] Thanks, Displace. Thank you, Displace.

[38:48] So, OFFS in our Discord shared this one. Chris says he shared that link, not Joe Ferguson.

[38:58] I got one from you, Chris. Just freaking relax. I’m pretty sure the one I saw was Joe, but whatever. It was Chris. Okay, fuck Chris. Jesus Christ. Pat on the fucking head, dude. Jeez. okay uh of s shared one that we had actually heard about already uh through a few avenues but discord we talked about discord and how important they are to us uh okay now see now look at this see joe says he shared the pr one i thought that was what we were talking about was the pr one i don’t know i thought we were talking about the uh ais talking to each other one no i brought that up I brought that up and said to fight it God, you guys, I hate everyone, done doing this goddamn podcast okay OFFS brought up Discord now is requiring IDs for full access, this is a little misleading, so. Supposedly, you need to now prove to Discord by sending your driver’s license or some sort of form of ID of your age. It doesn’t really apply as across the board as they kind of lead you to believe.

[40:17] It’s only for age-restricted channels, which we are not. So you’re able to join, at least today, you’re able to join the PHP Architect Discord and not have to worry about proving your age, because why would you, right? Until they change their rules and say that unless you say you are specifically for kids, then you are age restricted. I can see that coming down the pipe. Really? Is that even a thing you can do? well that’s that’s how youtube works right you either say you are you you’re making content for kids or you’re not yeah and i can see just uh discord doing the same thing you either are a kids discord channel or you’re not and in that case you need to be age verified yeah this actually brings up an interesting conversation that we had as a family uh last week of the week before so So anyways, before I move forward, what are your thoughts on this?

[41:23] I think it’s dumb.

[41:26] One, we’ve had people come to us and say, hey, if they do this, I’m ditching Discord and I’m leaving. So that’s going to hurt, could possibly hurt our community on Discord. And then do you try to pick up and move to something else? And then you move to something else and they do the same thing.

[41:45] I think it should be, like you said, you are going to a very specific place looking for absolutely not kid-friendly stuff. Right.

[42:00] But I don’t know. I think it’s crazy. Yeah. So the reason something similar came up in our little family this week or last week, I, I, I, the exact, uh, context escapes me. Um, but the, it was basically talking about how, um.

[42:26] What was it, man? I mean, it was like this Amazon thing where you said something or you looked for, you were looking at a website and then you go to Amazon and all of a sudden it’s showing you product for that website. You know, like, you know, the shoes that that person wore. Something like that. But it was in a very creepy, creepy way. And my reply to them was, yeah, you know, when people talk about the algorithm, that’s what they’re talking about. And unfortunately, it’s been a dirty secret that we’ve had this for a long time, because if we didn’t have this algorithm that was looking for certain content, the the Internet would just be porn right now. If you remember, every bulletin board you used to go to would have porn crap posted on it. It was just hard to navigate and very easy for children to stumble onto that stuff. So we as developers started figuring out algorithms of how to identify certain

[43:30] content and how to show and not show certain content. And then, of course, that then grew into, you know, bigger uses of the algorithm, no matter how you feel about it. And I don’t know. I mean, I kind of feel like this kind of starts to fall in that gray area of, yeah, I mean, you know, if Discord didn’t do something like this and something, some kid got exposed to something. And I’m sure they ensued a few times because their kids have stumbled across a chat that wasn’t appropriate for them. And I don’t know. I mean, I don’t like it, but I’m also an adult and I don’t worry about it because it’s not going to honestly restrict me. The real question is, you know, what are they doing with the information I give them to prove to them that I’m of age, right? Right. I think they clearly stated in there that they don’t keep anything. It stays local, but it can’t. All right. It’s, it can’t. Yeah, exactly.

[44:36] It’s the exact same thing. Yeah. That’s the rule until it’s not, you know, and then they’ll hide that somewhere else. And we share it with a third party just to verify your age and then we’re done. But yeah. So it’s so hard. I understand businesses being held accountable for what happens to kids online, but at the same time, it’s like, it’s so hard to control that stuff.

[45:05] Sarah, I do talk to my kids and it’s funny when they curse at me and it’s, he does not say, he does not talk to him at all. Yeah. They barely remembers their name. It’s embarrassing. It’s, it’s actually, as they get older, it’s gets, It’s more and more fun to have conversations with them. And like you can go down rabbit holes and talk to them about real stuff. And they seem to understand. Yeah. Yeah. I was with my older kid and we’re driving behind a minivan and they had the sticker condoms prevent minivans.

[45:45] So then i had a whole conversation about condoms and how he’s getting older and he, anytime now he’s gonna people are gonna start calling him condom because of our last name and because kids are kids and they will find out of that oh i was called that,

[46:06] and back then yeah trojan commercials so i got called trojan and i just embraced that and like Yeah, I’ll take that as a nickname.

[46:16] I learned not to fight. We should have named her dog Trojan. Can’t get near her anymore. Sarah is threatening me with spicy photos that my wife has sent her. I doubt that happened because they don’t make disk drives that big anymore.

[46:38] Stop it.

[46:41] God, I’m a little dizzy, man. That was a big laugh.

[46:48] Oh, you want to talk some fun? Oh, you already have some stuff queued up. No, no, give it to me. Yeah, yeah, let’s do it. I like that one. I like that one a lot. So some friends in the community, the PHPC community. Oh, Jesus Christ, dude, this page. Wait a minute. Let me get a share it again. I screwed up and broke the share. Go ahead. Keep talking. so friends in the php community especially phpc um there’s a php community discord, ben ramsey and a bunch of other people part of it started phpc.tv and they wrote to us and like hey do you want to put your videos on here and they bring them in from youtube and we’re like sure so i clicked the button and it brought in all of the videos so we’re like we’re like, you know years worth of videos just plastered on the front page yeah so yeah we because we’re the last one to do it i’m pretty sure that’s why most of ours are the most recent here yeah,

[47:47] oh gosh oh god that nobody should have to click on any web page and see like my face across the board jesus christ that’s horrifying i must not talk in any videos i’m not in any of them, Yeah, you’re down here, you’re down here.

[48:04] PHPC.TV did reintroduce me to Eric’s XDebug3 content because it has not been coming up in my YouTube algorithm for some reason. And so I was excited about that. I started watching. He was the… Derek, your channel is the first one I subscribed to on PHPC.TV. You probably haven’t subscribed to your own channel, have you? I don’t think I have to. Oh, you don’t? Let me see. Yeah, maybe not. I don’t think I did. So, yeah, phpc.tv forward slash C, I guess for channel, forward slash phparchitect is our channel. And, yeah, unfortunately, it pulls it in. So it pulls it in initially in a weird order where it does shorts first, then it pulls in newest to oldest. So, like, the older videos are the most recent ones pulled in. Oh, really? Yeah. And there’s no way to change the order, which is pretty crazy.

[49:12] But, yeah. So, yeah, this is a… All this stuff here so this is being powered by peer tube which if you’re not familiar is an open source version of youtube or well it’s an open source project that’s kind of based on you know a youtube channel thing so very cool the only issue i had initially and maybe it’s gotten better is it just was so slow so slow and i thought about the impact and that wasn’t bad.

[49:49] Yeah so yeah i can’t imagine um what they’re hosting this on if they’re if they’re physically pulling down the video files i mean that that’s gonna take up some space after a while man i’ll hear sarah sarah on.

[50:10] Tag or shout out to share to share no shout out to sarah for pulling up a terminal and just doing some live coding on alive and kicking that was pretty awesome of you sarah a big fan big fan of yours so yeah that’s out there if you’re really looking for php focused content um they have new on here. Just a bunch of people. More and more people. PHP Annotated is on here. More and more people are joining. So, kind of cool. Kind of cool. Check it out. Oh, you know how they should put on here? There’s a couple of YouTubers I can think of. I need to go, Reach out and see if they’re interested. Dude, we have been doing YouTube for a while now on PHP Architect. That’s crazy. That is crazy. The numbers don’t show it, but we have been. They do. You lie. They show it. You can definitely see. We tick up. We’re not at a million subscribers yet, but we’re getting there. We’re closer than we were before. At the rate we’re going, we’ll be there in about 25 years.

[51:19] My grandkids are going to be so excited.

[51:23] My dad’s a youtuber grandpa’s a youtuber yeah um oh did you get anything else fun you got a bunch of stuff in here i do uh kind of along those same lines not exactly uh but if you’re familiar with sebastian he is the brains behind php unit this is what’s great about our community, right? So Sebastian says, the problem with PHP unit questions, you either get answers from outdated blog posts, which is absolutely true, or conflicting stack overflow threads. True as well. In AI, that confidently gives you the wrong solution, which we’ve been talking about for a while now. He is offering himself up for an hour each month. He’s calling, I think he’s calling office hours. There we go. Office hours. Where I guess he’s just going to start fielding questions in real time. This sort of thing just is so awesome. I love seeing this. I got, I’ve gotten a couple of chances to speak to Sebastian. I did.

[52:33] I have interviewed him in the past. Very. I, what i nothing like derrick at all very humble you know he’s not like oh look what i did no just kidding i’m only saying that because i know you’re here but um yeah because i i’d asked him specifically uh i i actually got to interview him right after pesk was released the first version of pesk which you know has no problem in reminding us that we were not pesk fans initially uh and it’s true right and i’d asked him about it i’m like hey you know how do you feel about, Projects like Pest, where they’re just adding a, basically a wrapper around your PHP unit. And his answer was, I don’t care. Like, whatever it takes to get people to do unit tests and do testing on their code base, I’m all for it. If they need a wrapper around PHP, another wrapper around PHP unit, no issues at all. I support them. I’m going to be happy to work with them on it. So yeah yeah that was it and that

[53:43] was our gripe at the time was that i didn’t feel that pesk was bringing anything to the table that you couldn’t already do with php unit it just felt like especially back then we’re talking years ago now it just felt like everybody was putting laravel wrappers around existing projects and i actually think they did they did something similar to xdbug right didn’t they do a larabug or something or anyways i don’t know but that was my great was like if you’re not adding anything to the existing functionality then encourage people to learn how to do it with the existing functionality but uh but my my opinion of pest has changed i i’m a massive fan of the latest release i think it’s doing things that a lot of uh that that were blind spots for a lot of tools out there uh testing tools out there so So a big fan of PEST today, but Sebastian is huge. Yeah. Lara bug is a error tracking tool. Not a, not like a Steve bug.

[54:45] Gotcha. Gotcha. How are we on time? Okay. I got one more thing to talk about and then I will talk about this next thing here. That’s really all I need to talk about today. All right. So something else came up in the. Discord today i think it was today yeah i’m gonna say it was today uh there is a site out there called elephant.me if you’re not familiar with what elephant.me is it’s just a thing of all the elephants out there uh some information about them and the cool thing about it is you can explain the ones that you have you can explain them you can uh mark ones that you’re interested in having and then you can also say hey i have elephants to trade here are the ones i have to trade. Uh so it’s kind of a cool little uh fun community thing i think there’s another one like this i forget the other ones called but i’ve always used elephant.me so i’m on elephant field guide, oh right right right yeah so my handle on

[55:51] elephant.me is shokum so you can see all my stats here but i always had an issue with elephant.me um and specifically it was around the mastodon handle so if you look at the mastodon handle oh you don’t see the link you’ll never see the link so if you click on the mastodon handle uh it’s hard it’s hard to see but it actually takes you to the Mastodon website. That’s why it’s JSTech because I didn’t put JSTech on the PHP Arch Mastodon instance. So it takes you to Mastodon.social and then it does the at phparch.social which, fine, whatever. It works. But it’s not what I wanted to do. Like, I wanted to go to my Mastodon instance and, you know, go to me. Don’t proxy me through mastodon.social. What’s the difference? Like if I clicked follow you here, is it going to follow you on phbr.social?

[56:55] Well, so that’s the issue. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on how you have the instances set up. So, yeah, I assume. Let me see if it works here. Yeah, so this one does. But I have clicked on follow before, and it says, oh, you have to go to that user’s instance in follow or something. I forget what the caveats are exactly. It’s weird. So anyways i i wanted to go to my instance of mastodon also there’s no blue sky so this is an open source project and i pulled down the code and i created my own version right so this one now if i click on this link it takes me to the php arch.social and i know you can’t really tell the difference because we have we have the basic um mastodon instance but it takes me to php arch.social forward slash at eric which is what i think it should be doing um and of course i’m logged in so and then i also added a blue sky as well so blue sky well i’ll always take you to blue sky and when i was

[58:13] doing this so i opened up a pr for that but when i was doing it was like it’s a Laravel app that was, uh, I want to say two or three, two, it must’ve been like two major revisions behind old tailwind, old, um.

[58:32] Livewire was it i forget there are a couple old packages on it so i’m like hey i bet you i can, upgrade all their packages for them and i do that so i i read all their packages did you do it in the same pr as adding two links okay i made i made two big mistakes two bigger errors in judgment here let me go over here so the first error i made um so my first pr was just what i what i said the uh the adding blue sky and correcting the links for mastodon i only did the mastodon thing because i had that issue before with php roundtable i wanted to be able to link to sarah’s profile and she wasn’t on twitter at the time i don’t think she still is on twitter but uh i wanted to be i wanted people to be able to link to her account on mastodon and so not only the way if you don’t understand how mastodon works it’s not always going to the same thing so it’s not because you have a mastodon instance doesn’t mean you’re going to mastodon.social at a person’s name you know we

[59:46] have our own mastodon instance for php architect phpc has their own instance so it was like trying to get it so that when they clicked on it it took them to the right instance was like. Challenging and i i figured it out for php roundtable so i’m like yeah let me do this for these guys and they appreciate it and all that and then um i’m like well shoot you know all this stuff is out of date so let me go ahead and upgrade all their stuff and if you’re so i sit here and i upgrade uh i put them on php 8.2 laravel 12 uh i thought there was something i I said, oh, I added PESC4 for test to it. And then I included my PR from, oh, I’m not even sharing the right screen anymore. My God. Sorry about that, guys.

[01:00:41] I pulled in this first PR. I pulled that into my second PR. So that was probably a mistake. And then I didn’t get all the tests to pass because I didn’t care.

[01:00:55] I gotta be honest with you i didn’t want to try to figure out what tests were failing and why they were failing i assume they were failing because because of something i did with with pesk actually no it doesn’t look like it was done at all.

[01:01:11] Oh is this why it was failing because of this okay well i guess i can fix that, but uh you know i do all this work and it’s fine like i understand i’m not expecting stuff to be merged right away but this was like five months ago and there’s been no comments like nobody’s talked and if you look back like there are some old prs on here like this adding messages feature um, at least this has some conversation this has two two conversations to it so yeah but it’s back in 2021 yeah yeah so i don’t know i i reached out to to them on twitter and, eventually they they replied and said oh i’m sorry i don’t check my twitter very often um I’ll take a look at this. That was like two months ago.

[01:02:13] So now I just want everybody in our Discord to ping this person and say, hey, clean up your PRs. But yeah, I’ve played with the idea of hosting it. Yeah, I was going to say, or find a new maintainer. Yeah. Or invite somebody to help maintain it. You don’t have to do everything yourself. Totally agree with that idea. I think there are actually two maintainers on this one. I forget how you, how you can tell that, but yeah, man. I mean, if you’re not going to maintain an open source project, that’s fine. Don’t, don’t maintain it, but find somebody who’s willing to do it, especially when there’s that much interest to updating it. Like, I don’t know, do something like just do something like either close, Don’t accept PRs and close it or highlight anchors. Like there. Oh, what’s this?

[01:03:13] What is that? It’s like, that looks like there’s some interesting things here.

[01:03:20] Like really, man, kind of go through this stuff.

[01:03:25] Anyways, that’s my little bitch. I get no respect thing for this week. Nobody, nobody loves me. Nobody, nobody cares about me. Okay. One more thing real fast. I know it’s getting late in. My dog is reminding me that it is potty time.

[01:03:43] Chris Miller, part of our team for now, but pushing my buttons lately. I’ll tell you that is doing a talk for merge PHP immediately after our podcast. I think theirs start at 5 o’clock now. So an hour from now. Yeah, which is horrible for Chris, who’s just outside London. So that is, what time is that for you, Chris? Do I have this current?

[01:04:14] It’s midnight right now, I think, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s midnight now, so another hour would be 1 a.m. And then, you know, I don’t know how long. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate you. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that’s right. He’s bailing your ass out, isn’t he? God damn you’re such a horrible person anyways uh head over to merge uh youtube.com uh forward slash merge php we’ll we’ll put a link to the actual live stream but if you just go there and if you’re not subscribed to their channel subscribe it’s just cool um i wonder if they’re on phpc oh yeah i actually looked earlier they are on phpc so yeah um so yeah check it out Domain Driven PHP,

[01:04:59] Domain Driven PHP I’m excited I’ll be there Nothing else To harass him That card you have is the link to it Okay I went and found it and was like Oh you’ve already got it, Yeah I just didn’t want to read it out Yeah yeah yeah Another reason to join our discord During the live stream is Well I don’t know discord Are the links coming in, Links are not coming in. That happened last week, too. Yep, it crashed. I got to see why this is crashing. Link’s coming in fast, Discord.

[01:05:36] All right. Sorry about that, Discord. Now you’re going to get flooded with links. You’re about to get flooded with links, yeah. Until it crashes again.

[01:05:49] All right. Oh, my God. I’m done, John. Yeah, me too. We’re off next week. I’m taking next week off, John. I don’t care what you say. Me too. I’m going to go hopefully medicate up and make it through this coaching clinic tonight and hope I’m better for my trip. We’re going to see John on the next podcast. It’s like two casts like this. Right? You’re going to ski. You’re hoping I’m going to be on the next podcast is what you’re saying.

[01:06:19] Do a Sonny Bono. Jeez. Oh, Jesus. Damn. You didn’t have to get all dark about it. But, I mean, you know, your chance is up to date, right?

[01:06:31] I should make sure you know how to get to that information. Yeah, right? Exactly.

[01:06:37] Actually, I actually did create a file in my filing cabinet right by me. If I die, start here.

[01:06:47] Did I tell you? I don’t think I told you. It’s kind of personal. I shouldn’t tell anybody. This was when this happened, uh, back in 2025, when I was going through my cancer thing, 2005, not 25. Oh yeah. 2005. Sorry. I was going through cancer. Uh, and I was going through chemo. Sorry. I had cancer going through chemo, doing a bunch of, uh, surgeries, uh, Yeah, I came to the realization that, yeah, I wasn’t leaving my family or anything. Like, we didn’t own a house. You know, we didn’t have, you know, a big savings account. Yeah, I had, like, your normal life insurance, nothing big. It really bothered me at the time. But my kids were also really young. And so I had recorded these videos and put them on servers that I probably should not have put them on, but I had access to, so I did. And I created a cron job that would check in with me every, I forget what it was, like once a week or once a month or something.

[01:07:49] If I didn’t reply to it, it would start sending out the links to the family on how to get the videos.

[01:07:58] And I never shared it with them. So obviously I’m still alive. They didn’t need to visit the videos. I had to take them down because they were probably somewhere they shouldn’t have been. And so I took him down but like I was so proud of myself at the time because I had thought through all this stuff and like there was no like, I don’t know if there was YouTube but I don’t remember there being YouTube like I just remember like trying to figure out how I was going to share these messages, but they were like they would start sending out like a video a month for I think I did like three or four or five months after that and.

[01:08:37] I was so happy to get to the other side of that battle that I just deleted them. Like I, I, in my head, it’s like, okay, this is over. This is done. And now in hindsight, I’m like, shit, I should have held onto them and probably shared them at some point, but I didn’t, didn’t do that. It’s one of my bigger regrets in life, but all things considered, I can live with that regret. So, yeah, yeah, it’s, It’s funny. You got to think about the shit as you get older, man. Right. So I, I, I, I’m not, uh, yeah, no shame to that. The problem is, is if, if, if, if, you know, you’re assuming somebody is coming back home to like start looking. Well, I, yeah, I, I did something similar after my heart attack, like started like writing stuff down and recording stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. It happens so quick. It can happen. And that’s like an illness. Like, you know, my cancer, your heart attack, like…

[01:09:46] You know, everybody, I mean, I, I tell my kids this all the time, appreciate the people in your life because it happens so quick. It doesn’t, they don’t need to be sick. You know, they just need it. Every time you step outside the house, you’re assuming certain risks and it sucks, man. It sucks hard. It sucks hard. So yeah. All right. Well, we need to, I don’t know if Chris has figured out how to do the co stream so merge php is on restream and technically uh we should be able to restream or we should be able to stream his talk on the php architect uh channel in which case you should give notification in our discord channel that uh a stream has started i don’t know if they knew how to do that if they shared the right link with uh chris and if chris knows how to do it i don’t think chris so he needs to do anything but log in under his PHP Architect handle. But we’ll see. So it’ll either be on the PHP Architect YouTube channel,

[01:10:53] and if not, head over to the Merch PHP YouTube channel. Regardless, head over to the Merch PHP YouTube channel and subscribe because they do presentations like this once a month. It’s a user group for, like, all the user groups. So it’s kind of cool. Go over there. What a nice guy. You’re so kind. Nope. I’m good. I’m ready. I’m ready to go skiing. Well, you need to go ready to learn some baseball coaching because God, you need it. No, that’s not true. You won it all last year, didn’t you? Yep. Yeah. You’re doing good this year too. At this point. Just so you know. Okay. All right. Cocky. All right. That’s it. We will see you guys in March, I guess. Right? Or is there another February? There’s one more February. There’s the 26th. 26th. Yeah. the 26th. See you guys on the 26th. Bye. Bye. Bye. See you. This has been PHP Podcast. The official podcast of PHP Architect. The industry’s leading tech magazine

[01:12:04] 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.

[01:12:28] This has been php podcast the official podcast of.

Air date	February 12, 2026
Hosted by	Eric Van Johnson, John Congdon
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The PHP Podcast 2026.02.12

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Eric Van Johnson

John Congdon

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