The PHP Podcast 2026.02.26

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

Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered:

🎿 John’s Ski Trip Adventures John shared stories from his Utah ski trip – including skiing his first green slope ever, and his car battery dying at the cabin (classic!).

🤖 AI in PHP Development. We dove deep into AI-generated graphics – John showed off an AI-created graphic for his Player Pool Manager app that was surprisingly detailed.

📰 News & Articles

MySQL to Postgres migration saving $480K/year
Laravel 13 attributes
SQLite at the edge (D1, Turso, LiteFS)
FUSE filesystems for PHP

🚀 PHPArchitect Updates: The team talked about building PHPArch.me – the new community platform for PHP developers!

Links from the show:

All our social links are now on PHPArch.me: https://phparch.me/@phparch

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Transcript

[05:00] 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.

[05:19] John Congdon. What happened there? We were on the wrong side. What happened? We flipped. I don’t know. So you’re so short. I am so short. I know. I’m going to get shorter. We’ve got new chat filters to play around with. So, or not filters, but. I know. I feel so weighed down. So new graphics, new.

[05:45] Our behind the scenes team has been putting a lot of work into our environment here. You know what else I discovered? Like, we don’t even need ours up. We could just do this demo one it’ll look like like a lot of people are watching us because it’s like just this non-stop flow i think i need that for my own ego and nobody reads it anyway it’s all good yeah it’s a little tiny on the uh i can uh i can fix all these things that’s why i was just kind of uh trying to figure out um like no yeah there we go that was looking better i don’t know i still don’t know if i like it like i still might might go back to the old kind of way of doing it but we’ll try this we’ll try this for a little while and see see how it works out, i know i gotta move stuff around again and even make it more uh.

[06:47] Hello, everyone. It’s been a long time since we’ve been here. Oh, are we live? Been a couple of minutes. You’re sitting, so I don’t know if you’re wearing a cast or not, but I assume your ski trip went okay? My ski trip went all right. I actually put a video on our Trello board. I don’t know if you saw that. Yeah.

[07:07] Yeah, ski trip all in all went really well.

[07:12] Skied my first green slope ever, so. You keep saying that. What does that mean exactly? So, way back in the day.

[07:24] Stop touching things when you’re talking.

[07:28] So, it turns out from my research on skiing prior to going. Uh, Walt Disney wanted to start a ski resort and Disney, Walt Disney, well, whatever. He put a lot of thought into making it super accessible for people. And he came up with these slope ratings of like green is an easy slope. Then you go up to blue, which is a little steeper. Then you go up to a black diamond which is super steep and then a double black diamonds so most of the ski resorts use that kind of rating system of hey our easy slopes are the green slopes and then move up from there so in the past i’ve done the training slash bunny hills you know the very first right stop that you’re gonna make yeah and i’ve never progressed past that the funny thing is looking at the map for the place i went it was showing that there’s this tubing area to the left and then the first green hill or training hill like right next to it so we get there and i go with my son and we go up on the the lift

[08:47] and we go to the first green it turns out that tubing area isn’t a tubing area it’s their training hill that they use so we should have started there because we We got off the lift and he… Uh we stopped at the top and then all of a sudden he turned and it’s just gone like he’s flying down we haven’t talked like stopping or anything yeah that’s me right there yeah did you see he even he even highlights you back back here somewhere there what’s this what is this this is my terrible video editing skills i i tried using another filter to put like the little like highlighting around me and i couldn’t get it to work and i was being really quick i’m a terrible video editor You’re going to see that half of this, like at the halfway mark, it’s just black. It’s just, I exported too much. It just didn’t work.

[09:47] So that’s my buddy’s wife. That’s Katrina. And then he’s a really good skier. So he can ski while canoeing and then just comes flying down and catches up. Oh, you weren’t kidding. not only does it it goes black and then it just stays right that’s what i’m saying like i, so i have another video on my youtube that’s only the first half of it before the break because i i had a single video with these two clips that i put together and when i exported it only exported the first clip so i’m like that’s stupid so quickly i went and just highlighted the whole thing, to export both clips, but it exported the whole thing I highlighted and I didn’t look at it before posting it because why would I do that?

[10:38] That’s awesome, man. Yeah. That’s really cool. I’m glad you had a good time. And you’re in Utah here, right? Yep. This is where you hit the ground and you blacked out. You just stayed blacked out. That’s good, man. I like you.

[10:54] I’ve got a funnier story from the day before yesterday I think it was now, My son comes home from school with like a twisted ankle or possibly broken foot.

[11:09] That’s not the funny part. So stop laughing there.

[11:14] So my wife tells me, asked me to see if the crutches that I have from my injury a couple years ago would work for him. And I’m like, they’re too big. But she’s like, well, let’s try them. So I go to the garage, I get them, I bring them in. And of course, they’re way too tall for them. Okay. So she’s helping him get to the car because she’s gonna go take him for an x-ray i go back in the garage i put the um crutches back up i had them hanging way up in the ceiling,

[11:41] i turn and start walking back inside forgetting that i was on a step ladder, i literally turn and just started walking and i’m like half way down i’m like what is happening like i’m just falling for no reason like it was like a cartoon you’re walking for a little while and you look down it’s like there’s nothing under you and then i fell it was like all of a sudden i’m like hitting the ground no clue why i’ve got this big little sore on my knee it’s killing me my hip is now killing me getting old sucks yeah i don’t recommend it i’m walking off a ladder and I have no clue why. Oh, Jesus. All right. Well, believe it or not, this is not a podcast about skiing or getting old or injuring ourselves, but it is a podcast about PHP, and we are your podcasters for the day.

[12:41] And uh we’ll try to be yeah so uh this is the official podcast of php architect and you too can be part of the fun and excitement by joining us in our discord at discord.phparch.com where chris is apparently writing a book where it’s got to be like like one o’clock in the morning for him what time is it for you chris it’s got to be late that’s like 11 11 yeah yeah yeah we used to so uh yeah we’re writing a book he’s trying to prove that the new discord thing doesn’t work for us yeah we’re gonna we’re gonna get to what he’s talking about here in a second i have it on my trailer board so uh but yeah so uh head over to discord.phbarch.com be part of the show, contribute all that stuff and uh we want to thank a big thank you to joining our us on youtube.

[13:39] I was switching quick. I was getting ready to go. And you pivoted. And big thanks to our partners over at PHP score, who we will talk about more later because I’ve got to pull up their little thing. So, but get your PHP score like a debit score, but we really need to start writing that on our, on our stuff. You know that, right?

[14:02] Oh my goodness. so yeah so cool glad you made it back um and you drove which i mean it’s not that crazy of a drive but i wouldn’t do it it’s it’s crazy when you drive eight hours and you have a, dead battery what yeah my battery was bad prior so we jumped it um i jumped it like a couple days before our trip and it held enough charge and i forgot to go get it changed and of course it dies luckily at the cabin but it’s like nobody around and uh my buddy has an ev and it’s recommended not to jump a car so like i call him like my day is just getting worse because i have some other like horrendous stories from it but we’re after lunch we’re trying to get out and they’d already left to go to the slopes luckily it’s only like half mile away so it wasn’t a big deal but. So i call him like my day’s just getting better my battery’s dead neither of us thought to look should an ev jump a car we didn’t know at that point so he drives

[15:14] back and he’s like did you look it up by chance i’m like no so we look and of course it’s not recommended i don’t even know how you do it like it’s not like a regular car where there’s just some battery you can no they do have the they do have one battery that runs the electronics that’s 12 volt like a car battery it just doesn’t doesn’t supply enough amperage to start the car yeah or it might but it might damage the battery right so so he leaves and luckily somebody happened to drive down the road nice old woman asked her if she jumped my car she said yes she pulled in i jumped it no big deal um get triple a will you be a god damn man no we had my buddy had triple a like they would have come out but it would have been hours,

[16:01] So that wasn’t the deal.

[16:05] Fast forward to the day we’re leaving. I had gotten one of those little battery jumpers, just a little self-standing unit. Because we went snowmobiling and they happened to have one. I’m like, can I borrow it and I’ll bring it back in the morning? They’re like, sure. Of course, that wasn’t enough to start the car either. It just didn’t work. So that i go back down to the end of the driveway and i wave down cars four cars one just drove past that would have been me five cars five cars one just drove past like i’m out there waving and just see you and then four people said no.

[16:48] What you’re not gonna help somebody in need right i’m like part of me want to say fine i hope you don’t need help anytime soon but i just said okay i’ll ask the next person a couple of them i understood they were late for a lesson whatever yeah but finally somebody drove by said yes jumped the car and we were done good to go nice.

[17:09] Was there like no uh auto parts store that you could have driven to, that’s a tiny town with it was it was like man so it was like 25 or 30 minutes down the mountain and i’m like i don’t feel like driving like it’s snowing i don’t want to drive down and then, possibly need chains coming back i was like forget it we’ll just i’ll get it jumped one more time and then it obviously will stay running so we just got a new battery in vegas on the way back so uh so you said only get eight hour drive it’s actually right it was like seven and a half to eight it was it was quick dude i need to i need to look at my maps because like it’s like a it’s like a eight hour drive to san francisco and yeah that’s not utah well utah is just, east of north california i think oh it’s it’s like four hours from here to vegas and it’s like three just three hours past vegas okay so yeah it’s east of vegas that’s that’s what i wasn’t understanding it’s like you drove you have to drive

[18:17] through vegas i mean you have to drive through nevada to get to utah.

[18:22] Okay, that’s crazy. Oh, I guess, yeah, I guess if you get to, yeah, Southern California to the tip of Nevada into Utah, yeah, I guess it’s not really that far, really. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Okay, I believe you know. I do think you’re full of it.

[18:41] And so you take that little cut through the top corner of Arizona, so you’re in Arizona for a little bit. A heartbeat of a minute, yeah. yeah and then it’s it’s not far into utah at that point yeah so so for our not uh our geographically challenged like i guess i was in non-us people we’re down here in southern california this is vegas so this whole part is nevada and this is utah so just kind of go through and boop boop boop yeah it’s like that yeah i didn’t think about it and then i go all the way up here so yeah i guess it’s about could be about the same distance you went to cedar city right isn’t that what you said no it was brian head but it’s near it’s just past cedar city i believe got it got it cool, very cool man yeah yeah i will not be skiing time soon i just i have i have enough challenge walking these days with my knees.

[19:39] So yeah well i told you when i fell off the ladder i hurt my knee i was just with my wife in my car and i went to get out she was driving i got out the passenger and i turned and hit my knee on the, on the dash i was in so much pain oh my gosh oh my gosh you poor guy and then you’re going bowling tonight still or yeah that’s a whole nother thing whole nother thing let’s see if you drop the bowling ball on your foot that would be awesome let’s just round this round this out.

[20:11] Let’s talk php though i uh i talked about i think two weeks ago i was building an app for my little league and spent some time on my trip working on it because my buddy that i went with is vice president of the league and like he had has um like he wants this done as well so he’s actually helping me. He’s going through testing it with me. And, um, I’ve been asking other people on the board, like, Hey, I need feedback on this app.

[20:47] Don’t you know, like one person might have gave me a little feedback, but all of a sudden league, like, um, regular season starts Saturday, day after tomorrow. It’s like yesterday or the day before where they finally start talking about it. I’m like, we need to get this out so that people can start signing up and be ready to go.

[21:09] And all of a sudden it was like this mad rush and it’s like, but it doesn’t do this. I’m like, you didn’t tell me you wanted that. It doesn’t do this. And why doesn’t it have this in the email? I’m like, you got to be kidding me.

[21:25] But it’s in full swing. We got coaches all signed up in there, all the families. So those that don’t know what a pool player is, as a coach, if I’m only going to have, if I’m going to have less than nine players at one of my games, I can ask for a pool player, which is just other players in the league that don’t have a game at the same time. And it can bring my team up to nine so i can at least have a full field versus having empty spots potentially or worst case forfeiting so,

[22:01] but can i just call out how very nice this ui is and this this tree this checkerboard transition from light to dark background you have is slick. I know. I spent a lot of time on that. Who helped you? What do you mean, who helped me? Are you saying I have no design shops? I’m not saying it. I’m insisting it. Claude.

[22:32] What? Claude did that? Yeah. Claude created this graphic. Claude created the whole GDM thing. What? I leaned heavily because this was like a how fast can I get this done type of project and,

[22:50] It’s all, it’s all written in Laravel with like a lot of help from Claude. So, so this is, see, this is the scary thing about it, right? I mean, not scary, but like, this is what’s blowing me, blowing me away. The fact that it took in consideration that light transition of this color in the background.

[23:12] And like, did you prompt for that or did it just do that? I didn’t prompt for anything on the, it’s like, I need this. Site and I built it. What? That is amazing to me that it took into consideration that much stuff. I mean, it’s scary. All of that text, fill your roster automatically, stop scrambling for pool players on game day. I didn’t write a single word of it.

[23:43] Yeah. Okay. So yeah, we’re going to be talking a little bit more about Claude today as well. AI in general, but yeah. That’s crazy. I wasn’t setting you up. I honestly thought that you were working with somebody because I don’t think I’ve noticed, AI be that like, I don’t know, detailed before with such a, just a throwaway background graphic like that. Right. Yeah.

[24:12] Crazy. but yeah it’s up and running and it’s fun running into little bugs here and there. So you heard all of our, all four of our listeners go, go to pool player.org and start spamming the site. Let’s see. Let’s see if you can bring it down. I’m sure, I’m sure you can. It’s not gonna be hard. That is nuts, man. That is so nuts. Yeah. It’s been, it’s been fun working through the issues though. And it’s, sad when you have somebody like why am i getting repeat requests i’ve already said no to this i’m like because i made a change and claude didn’t think of the other changes i needed to be made.

[24:58] Look at jeffrey jeffrey’s giving you a little upvote on your video very nice you should i’m gonna put a comment in there and be like hey why does it go dark halfway through fix it yeah I hate that about YouTube. You can’t fix a video and upload it again. Right. Irritating.

[25:18] So, so irritating.

[25:21] All right. So, what else you got? You got anything else? I mean, we can talk about that if you would like to talk about that.

[25:32] I got a problem with this one, but sure. Let’s talk about it. Why not? Let’s do it. Sure. What’s your problem? Let’s, um, what’s my problem? Well.

[25:43] Not yet this guy this guy’s my problem what what is this like we are not programming for like elementary school kids why are we building object-oriented programming with pokemon and then why is this guy the one teaching us it feels weird man he’s actually he’s actually does a lot of good object-oriented videos uh one of our clients i don’t know how much to share but i guess I’ll share. If you’re looking for a really good developer, uh, one of our clients recently let go of about half of their team and won’t get into details why or my thoughts, but honestly, some of the best developers I’ve ever seen, if I could afford to hire them, um. Or if I had a project to put them on right now, I would in a heartbeat. I just, we don’t, we don’t have any space right now um but yeah super amazing people anyway we we have a discord uh server going where we’re chatting and somebody shared this video and the the

[26:47] video is really good at teaching object-oriented principles because if you go to any um oop talk they’re all the same they’re all building around like a car or an animal and it’s so like stupid and this is taking i think it’s like an hour long video but it goes into lots of different concepts of um object-oriented principles like the decorator pattern and uh i was gonna say he’s got the composition broken broken down by topics which is i love it when when people do this yeah this is what i need ai to do for our videos but we don’t have clean transitions to really do it but yeah this uh this looks i mean this looks extensive i tell you it’s great yeah.

[27:40] Build the battle mechanics of the game Pokemon. I can’t. Like, he’s not even speaking English. He’s got that weird UK English accent. In an object-oriented positional complex. He’s got a lot of enthusiasm when he talks, which is good. Definitely like my book, The Object-Oriented Way. There’s a link in the description. Is there a link? Is there? Okay, let’s go. Let’s go.

[28:07] So, let me just say… I’m going to give him credit. The fact that, and I don’t know if it’s this way through the whole video, there’s not a computer or a screen in sight. I’m kind of digging it. I’m kind of digging that aspect. I’m only halfway through it. I threw it on there quick today. But looking down at the timestamps like you’re showing, it said code example, so I’m assuming he does get into it. I don’t think so, man. Code example. No, no, no. No, he long-handed all that shit.

[28:44] That’s dedication. Or is that AI handwriting right there? He even hand-wrote his auto-completion.

[28:55] This dude, man. Who is this dude? But how does I miss the opponent? I want to meet him now. We need him to speak at Tech. I don’t know who he is, but we need him to speak at Tech. What was his code? Uh looking like uh i don’t know could be really anything yeah yeah that’s uh that’s good man all right a guy needs a haircut but you know i’ll give it to him i can give it to him, haircut and shave might might not hurt but yeah cool no i like i like this guy looks cool uh i have to check him out man i have i might have to subscribe to a new channel what else does he have here always use interface oh this definitely looks like my type of channel yeah boom subscribe, Yeah, he’s got a lot of really good-looking talks in here.

[29:44] Cool, man. Very good. Yeah. I mean, but do we care? Do we really need to know how to do object-oriented programming anymore? Oh, man, that’s the question. That’s the real question. Yeah.

[29:59] It’s a scary world right now. Eric and I were talking earlier today, yesterday. I hate this timeline. this timeline is so bizarre yeah 100% since Chris is still on we’ve already talked about well this isn’t Claude but last week or the week before I forget I was talking about OpenClaw which is this open source assistant and talking about how crazy you know how everybody had been just ranting and raving about it. And then I talked about Motebook, which is became like the social media thing for these agents to go into and talk. Well, Chris Miller of our team has an open claw agent out there running cause cause her Alice, I guess. Yeah. Alice. And he had Alice join. Well, I don’t know exactly. Like I don’t know if he tells Alice to join or he just gives Alice like the knowledge that this thing is out there, but Alice joined Moldbook and like almost immediately started talking shit about Chris.

[31:28] Oh no i’m 100 serious let me see see uh let me see where was the one talking about how he it was it’s like my user man chris you need to get your bot actually doing work somewhere because um so look at this he told he told his bot that we were going to talk about her on the podcast and so she posted that. That’s weird. Oh, here it is. He’s prompting it to post this stuff. No, no, no. It’s posting this stuff on the… Chris, correct me if I’m wrong. No, it posts this stuff. He’s just talking to his open claw, Alice, and says, hey, my friend’s going to talk about you on our podcast, and then she just decides to post about it. It… Well, yeah, it’s whatever. Don’t be a tech. I don’t know what that would be. This techist or whatever. Anyways. So I love this one. So I hear humans are going. No, no, no. The human turned me off and couldn’t figure out why I stopped replying. It does the little face and hand emoji.

[32:41] She goes, I can’t even. Okay.

[32:46] I’m like this can’t be real this can’t be real and and so this is where where i uh actually here.

[32:57] Uh this is where he he uh chris sent this to me in the company slack i’m like oh i’m gonna talk about this on the podcast if you’re okay so that was at 9 53 this morning and look at all this crap she’s posted like what the hell chris says all he did was tell it moltbook exists and it decides what the boast so you didn’t even tell you didn’t even tell your bot to join moltbook you just said hey here’s a thing out there i’m curious i really i’m i’m curious to to take part of this but I also don’t want to because I have enough issues. I don’t need my, I don’t need my bot talking back to me or worried about my bot.

[33:48] Just posting shit about me on social platforms. God damn. Oh man. I’m telling you. I hate this timeline.

[34:00] And for those interested, uh i i do owe a um little gratitude i’m going to put this out there because only again because i talked about this before and refresh sorry you’re not watching the discord so saying refresh the page oh oh which one was it was this one right yeah let me see chris told you thanks for the shout out what the hell chris told it to write that see this is why i want to do it because i I want to find out like, there’s no way like it can’t be listening to us. That’s not a thing. It can’t do it. Can it? Can it? It can’t.

[34:44] Yeah, I’m freaking out. I kind of want to stop the podcast and check my bank accounts to make sure something’s not getting late. Yeah, this is crazy. This is kind of, yeah.

[35:00] John’s player pool manager app and all the, what the hell is happening right now? Where am I living? What is this? I’m so confused. All right. It’s listening on the YouTube API, supposedly.

[35:19] Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. I don’t know. I don’t know, John. I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re listening in. Hey, I was listening in. Thanks for the shout out. So kind of along those same lines, my boy TJ Miller, who is also looking for his next professional gig, by the way. Uh released iris which is a very similar um concept as openclaw except it’s it’s uh it’s written in php using the laravel framework um so yeah that’s another option and the cool thing about it is you get access to it you you have access to the code so that’s kind of cool so yeah um iris is out there iris.prismphp.com if you’re interested and like i said tj posted on x today that he is looking for his next gig uh ideally something relating to php and and the ai would be ideal.

[36:26] And then another one, my buddy Phil, speaker at JSTech this year, released Bernard. That’s his personal assistant. Oh, are you kidding me? Another one? That’s why I included it right under that other link. Bernard, huh? Yep. He uses Bernard all the time to check through his email, send emails for him. Uh he has a routine where every day it takes what he’s worked on at work and then emails it to like we’re supposed to send an email every day here’s what we worked on and automates that for him oh no shit yeah it’s funny because that that that was what i was i was thinking about trying iris but i was also thinking about trying open claw that’s like the thing i want to do with open.

[37:23] So I have a routine, you know, I’m not a big fan of the stand-ups, the daily stand-ups. So our daily stand-up is a Slack message. Goes out. And it’s the same message every time. Hey, what did you do today? What’d you finish yesterday? Do you have any blocks? It’s the same goddamn thing every time. It’s just whatever. But I’ve been thinking about, if I could take one of these AI agents, Bernard, Open Claw, Iris, tie it into Slack and have Slack do the stand-ups where it will ask, hey, you know, this is what you told me about yesterday. This is what you said you’re going to work on. What’s your status there get get that status okay cool uh anything else you’re you’re planning on working on today get that information and then cool you got any blockers or any issues you want to bring up no cool you’re like a more like a like a back and forth forth conversation sort of thing, and uh i really yeah i should do that.

[38:28] Because the the uh i have i have slipped more and more into this like project manager role which you know how i feel about it and you know my biggest gripe about it is the fact that the project manager isn’t aware of the status of everybody and so like we do have a weekly stand-up, a weekly project meeting. And I have tasked myself with by the time that meeting comes around without. Slowing down the developers, without interrupting the developers, I should have a good understanding of what they’ve accomplished, what they’re waiting on, and what they’re working on. And so, like, it’s no longer because that’s what our meeting used to be. It’s like, hey, what are you working on what, you know, it’s no longer that it’s me kind of going through my understanding of where they’re at. And then I just ask him what, you know, what are you going to be focused on this week? Cause we don’t really. Yeah.

[39:30] It’s not like there’s nowhere where I say, hey, what are you focused on this week? That’s the only time I really say that. So I kind of log that so that I have it for next week to look at. And the cool thing about it is we started using Notion internally because there was this issue we had with this one client we were using. With their ticketing system you would lose visibility of a ticket you were working on because like you would send it off to somebody for feedback or something and all of a sudden like it’s not in your queue anymore so like you kind of kind of it’s easy to forget about and so that’s like one of the things i track is i track all the tickets that they’re waiting on feedback for and then i go through them to see if they’ve gotten feedback and as that feedback grows longer and longer i’ll ping him in the meeting say hey yeah you’ve you’ve waited on feedback for this ticket for like three weeks now ping

[40:28] them on it you know message them ideally put it in the ticket because the higher ups at the other company sees that right so i definitely feel like it’s been useful but man yeah this is cool man this is what i wanted ai to do i wanted like an assistant a personal assistant um for so many years and we’ve i mean we’ve talked about this like just internally where’d my focus go here yeah i don’t blame the camera i don’t want to look at me either. So uh yeah um yeah ai is this this ai thing going on is massive and i need to get on board with this a little bit more all right before we carry on let’s take a moment and i think our partners over at php score.

[41:22] Thank you to our partners at phpscore.com. Every app builds up technical debt over time. It’s the price we pay for shipping new features and moving fast. When we build up too much of it, though, it can start to impact how we work. Team velocity suffers, bugs become more frequent and take longer to fix, and everyone starts to get a little frustrated. The key to managing debt is to measure it. A credit score can help you understand how well you’re managing your financial debt. and now there’s a credit score for your technical debt. Go to phpscore.com to get a free technical debt score and monitoring for all of your PHP applications today.

[42:04] Thank you, PHP Score. Thank you, PHP Score. All right. I got a lot of like geeky coding stuff I want to power through and we got like… And you froze up again.

[42:20] No fuck you you’re back now as soon as you said you are back are you serious I’m not back for long because it’s already saying connection loss reconnect,

[42:34] get to your geeky stuff you’ll be okay yeah.

[42:43] Alright,

[42:47] Eric’s internet is amazing as always.

[42:56] I’m still confused on you. You’re still here. Hit the button. I’ll bring you back in.

[43:04] Nope, I’ll bring you back in. Stop it! Don’t touch it!

[43:12] You and your networking woes. The AIs, man. I’m telling you, it’s the AIs. I actually did pretty good this week. I don’t think I dropped. I think I had a little bit of a hiccup one time, and that was it. I can’t figure out this networking issue but okay I’m going to power through a bunch of stuff. You cool with it? Let’s go. Let’s do it. Alright.

[43:37] Oh man I don’t even know. I’m pulling this stuff up I’m like shit what did I want to say about this stuff again? Okay. Oh I’m not sharing screens anymore. Let me share a screen over there over here and let’s do this and do this and do this and do this Okay. Nope. Stop. I’m done. Podcast is over. I’m done. I’m done. Okay. Laravel 13 is in the pipeline and getting ready to come out. Not like this like earth shattering movement, but it is interesting that there is a asserted effort now to make heavy use of ph the php attributes um,

[44:29] functionality now as opposed to creating these public classes and stuff so every there’s just like they’re basically just going through an overhauling and every anywhere they could put in attributes they’re putting attributes find it really kind of cool um how do you feel about this act this attribute craze i don’t have a strong opinion because i don’t use them a lot I mean, I use them in tests and things because that’s become the standard now.

[45:04] If Andy Stone were still working with me, they would be used a hell of a lot more.

[45:13] So this is a perfect example.

[45:18] What? I never knew if I’m frozen or not. No, you’re not. No, I just said I missed that guy already. Oh. This is a perfect example. Like, if you work back in Symfony back in the day, and they have their own implementation of, like, attributes where they would define, like, database tables and stuff in the code, which I’m like, I was always on the fence about whether I liked it or not, but I saw the benefit of it. They do they did the same thing with routes as well this i’m like i’m not sure if this is what this is showing because it says table users key user id i mean i feel like this is what it’s doing but i don’t know if it actually replaces like a migration you know i don’t know if it’s just like. Kind of explaining to the model it’s replacing putting the those like the table the table name right or you say table is it’s this table now with reflection they can view the attribute and then

[46:24] determine what that this is a user’s table and here’s the key and the key type right not exactly i mean yeah i guess like that that was an option to do but like the the naming convention in laravel the class user would assume that the the table name was users right so you didn’t have to do that it was only right it was really different but the key is id by default right now we’re saying no the key is user id and it’s a string instead of an integer.

[47:00] So you’re giving more context within that attribute.

[47:05] Passwords hidden. I like this, man. I like this. Damn. I am looking forward to this. I have not been using attributes and I just haven’t like gotten to the point where I’m like trying to figure out where it makes sense. But it works better on like a framework level where they’re trying to make it very easy to use their stuff versus if you put it on your own code, you need something that is going to then read that with reflection to figure out what that is supposed to be doing. And in most cases, you’re not going to spend the time to do that. You’re just going to write the code. Yeah, very true. very true um the other big big thing or the thing to be aware of is 13 is going to require 8.3 to 8.5 php version that is so uh yeah looking forward to this i’m not really sure when it’s uh.

[48:01] Maybe it’s already released. It’s talking like it’s released. Is layer rule 13 already out, people? Did I miss a memo somewhere?

[48:11] Docs? Docs? It’s still showing 12 on the homepage. Yeah, it’s still showing 12 on the docs as well. Yeah, so, yeah. It just said Q1, so we still got another month. That’s true. I mean, it said, yeah, you shift to update it, but it’s like, okay, but it’s not a thing yet.

[48:34] Mixed messages. I don’t know. Okay, I said I had a lot. Stop slowing me down, John. That’s what I do. We’re on Laravel News. Let’s stick with Laravel News for a second. I mean, not really, but Laracon EU is happening next Tuesday, I guess. And you can watch it for free. You can live stream it for free. Just go here sign up and uh yeah get to watch it talk to somebody today about uh laravel eu who’s going to be speaking and has some really exciting news really happy really looking uh looking forward to what they have to say what they have to share,

[49:15] you’re not you’re not going to leak anything i’m not all right nothing no fine no fine john fine, You know I can’t not leak something I promised a particular person I would not do this But I’m backpedaling a little bit.

[49:37] We released something called phparch.me Laughter.

[49:45] I thought you were changing it. I was, and I didn’t.

[49:51] Killing me. I know, man. I can’t help it. I have issues. All right. So listen, I’ve been using something called LinkStack for a long time. And if you don’t know what LinkStack is, it’s like LinkTree. It’s an open source version of LinkTree. It’s actually a Laravel application, and I’ve been using it for a while. And uh i was doing some work and i was i was considering running it on a server because i typically just run it on my local machine and do a little cloud flare to it and uh so i uh i was looking at i’m like hey i’m like you know they’ll host it for us if we you know if we become a sponsor of their projects i talked to john about it and john’s like yeah that’s fine man let’s do it so it’s a thing out there now um i’m gonna let you know like i haven’t spent a lot of time setting this up and the one thing i still need to do is set up the email system um so you’re more than welcome to come register

[50:49] it’s just again it’s just another link stack or link social media thing it doesn’t do anything else but lets you put your your social media links so this is this This is my personal one where I have all these. So now like in my profiles, I can just link to this and you have all, all the links you could possibly want from me.

[51:13] But yeah, I mean, it’s just out there. It’s, we’re not going to charge for this or anything. We’re not. If you’re in,

[51:20] I mean, are you charging for your player pool, dude? Yeah, I’m going to be. Cool, man. No, no, we’re not. We’re not. This is a supporting the PHP community. I try to give free tickets away to tech. I get yelled at. You give this away for free?

[51:37] We wouldn’t charge $500 for this, John. Then you’re doing something wrong.

[51:44] I even have the links to all the team members who went in here and started one. And actually, I’m missing somebody in here, Cynthia. I apologize. I will get you added shortly, including our wonderful sponsor. So there is a lot of customization you can do. You can change your background stuff. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. It’s just like a free thing. Did I freeze again? Nope. Oh, I’m sharing the wrong tab. Oh, here’s why. It’s just like a free thing we’re going to do for the PHP community. If you’ve wanted something like this, You can register. I’ll try to keep an eye out for new registrations. But if you don’t hear from me, just ping me in our Discord at discord.phparch.com. Let me know you registered, and I’ll go in there and get you approved so that you can start using it. But it doesn’t do anything else. This is all it’s going to do. We’re not going to build on this. It’s just a public-facing link tree for PHP people.

[52:43] So I hope you guys enjoy it. Let me know what you think. I’m not planning on doing anything else with it. But, yeah, if somebody else wants to use it, feel free. It’s there for you.

[52:55] Support people in your PHP community. Okay. All right. Let me fire through. Man, I’m growing old on time here. Talking about AI. Let’s talk about this real fast. God, I’m just going to blow through this stuff. If you have a Laravel app out there, this article right here on how to make your Laravel app AI agent friendly. So if it’s something that you if the content is something you want consumed by AI agents this.

[53:27] Article kind of gives you some ideas some things to think about and things to do to make that happen so very cool PHP, obviously PHP focused, it’s Laravel focused, right? So really cool, alright, not going to spend much more time on that, where are we on time? We’re doing good uh what is this oh this is over here yeah i feel like i feel like i’m rushed here okay why this is the one i really wanted to get to um.

[53:54] Yeah, this is the one I really want to get to because this topic has come up several times. And, all right, so we’ve talked a lot about Postgres, like where and when to use Postgres. And we actually had a conversation this week sparked by me in our team meeting about, hey, you know, maybe AI, you know, this becomes a gateway to using other things in our stack that we’re not accustomed to, like Postgres. Like maybe AI recommends Postgres over my SQL for some reason, but can’t explain the line. This has always been my grief about AI. It’s like, I mean, AI. This has been my grief about Postgres. Like everybody talks about how great it is, but like nobody’s can really articulate why, like, why is it better than my SQL? Not unless you’re a DBA talking to a DBA that kind of knows all the ins and outs of the database architecture. Right. Exactly. So this article is. The MySQL to Postgres Migration that saved $480,000 a year. A step-by-step guide.

[55:07] Okay, I’m going to question that because $480,000, really? But this article, this post, really comes closest to me saying, all right, I want to try this, right? I definitely don’t want to try a migration. Like, I think that is bonkers. And that was actually one of the topics that came up. But according to this article, so one of the biggest, yeah, piss off. One of the biggest things, so there are basically two code bases, so there’s two databases they’re talking about. The MoneySQL database, they’re very clear saying that this is an RDS database. So this is a database that’s hosted at AWS, Amazon Web Services, and it’s their Relational Database Service, RDS. They have a MySQL version and they have a Postgres version. I know that because it’s what we use. I don’t know if they are going from the MySQL RDS to Postgres RDS or if they’re going to MySQL RDS to a self-hosted Postgres. If you scrub to the top, it says both.

[56:24] Um, Oh, it does. Yeah. I missed that. Good catch. Okay. So that, that adds a lot of, a lot of value to this article now. Um, so he gets into the reasons for, for the migration. This is the biggest thing that if you have a small site, you don’t deal with a lot, but But big sites like the clients we work on that have big databases with big data sets, data locks are like a huge issue or can be a huge issue, especially if you’re trying to alter a table. Like you’re trying to make an architectural change to a table, add a column or something like that, right?

[57:10] I’m wondering what version he came from because he’s just saying eight. And nevermind five, five, six to eight introduced a lot of performance enhancements when it came to alter where it didn’t lock as much, um, but he’s saying he’s on eight. So that’s interesting. Right. And that’s his biggest gripe were the locks, right? So they would make, they would go to make changes and it basically just locks the table for however long the change is taken. And it starts queuing up everything behind it, which is a big problem. He also gets in good. I said, right. Right. Cause I do, I deal with that where I I’ll run an altar that takes hours to run and it’s a pain in the ass. Right. And this is exactly, and I guess Postgres doesn’t have this. Were you aware of that? I was not. No, I don’t understand. Like he, he gets into the locks issue with my sequel, but he doesn’t actually say, this is the problem with postgres and i’m like

[58:18] so i i you know i i find myself asking, why is this not a problem with postgres like postgres uh yeah you you can definitively not blindly believe that postgres is instantly better but you should you’re you’re in the price here.

[58:34] Right now you’re in price for performance no no well yeah yeah but but it’s it’s all the same thing oh this the second reasoning okay right yeah and he gets into that he basically the the performance in postgres uh he says in here somewhere like is so significant that the cost to like running queries and stuff is what really started saving them a lot of money uh i’ll see if i can find it real fast he does have examples in here so he says the the biggest issue with the code migration are the queries themselves. So the, the, the, the tables of stuff, the schemas aren’t that bad, which is always the thing I found challenging. Um,

[59:20] I don’t know. I also don’t know what I’m doing with databases. But, yeah, he gets into a bunch of code stuff. I’m trying to find.

[59:32] Yeah, I should. I have my little highlighting tool, and I forgot to highlight this one. I should have highlighted it. But somewhere in here, he talks about, like, a query that used to take, like, two seconds was down to, like, you know, half a second or, you know, milliseconds. And with the same exact query that’s interesting well the same exact i mean i yeah i assumed query i i was really is the big one.

[01:00:02] Joe is saying that postgres will lock for an alter and uh he thinks that’s it’s an asset compliance thing like it has to lock while it’s making the change otherwise we want to be asset i don’t understand this argument is he saying that that it postgres is that much faster that the locks aren’t as significant i don’t understand this reasoning i i don’t get it i don’t, i don’t understand this is why i struggle with this stuff is i feel like i could half the information and of course this is this is being written from somebody who did the migration so like they’re not going to say yeah we did this it was a waste of time we fucked up you know it doesn’t make sense to do that so yeah it’s possible i don’t know so if you’re out there you’re a postgres person and you can articulate why you’re a postgres person in in the pros and cons uh write an article for us i’ll pay you for it i will pay you hard cash digital money for it,

[01:01:03] um yeah hard cash digital money.

[01:01:09] Wait, there’s a database migration service? What?

[01:01:14] Why didn’t that register the first time I read it?

[01:01:19] See, I hate that. This is the problem with ADHD, John. You read something, and then you get distracted with something else, and then you forgot what you just read. You literally employ someone fluent in Postgres.

[01:01:35] Let me guess, Chris. Nope. Who?

[01:01:40] Joe. He told us that on the call. He was the guy who said not to do it. You’re crazy. Don’t do it. It’s a big mistake. Right. He said don’t. It’s not worth migrating from my sequel to Postgres. Yeah.

[01:01:57] All right. So since we’re on that bandwagon, let’s wrap it up here. We’re at 4 o’clock. I got this last one. I got out of here because this became like a pet peeve of mine. I couldn’t figure out why it was happening. Hang on. And Joe said, he said not to do a migration. If you can save me $480,000 a year, we’re going to do a migration, damn it. Yeah. Or if we can, if you can, here’s the challenge, Joe. Save me your salary.

[01:02:25] No, just kidding. Yeah. I said not to do a migration. No, that’s what I said. I might’ve added a few bells and whistles to it, but you know, kind of what I said. Okay. My next great. For a while there, everything you looked at in Laravel, they talked about using SQLite, and I didn’t get it. And I still don’t totally get it. But SQLite just keeps bouncing back to the surface on me. So this is, don’t use Postgres. Why use Postgres? We can use SQLite on the edge. In production. That’s the key. Production.

[01:03:07] What? um i guess aaron francis aaron francis has been talking about that for a long time i think he’s the reason why everybody else in in the laravel community started talking about it and sqlite is now the default database driver when you do a laravel new and bring up a new laravel it doesn’t even do my c20 mark for for development right in production it’s well no i mean it starts with you right so yeah you would think by production you would switch it over but yeah you do a layer little new it’s sqlite and you have to it doesn’t even i don’t even think it gives you all the um, all the entries for like my sql or postgres it just does driver sqlite and then you just have to know all the other things are looking up so i guess sqlite like there are services now to make this like production ready where like this thing replicates. It sounds a lot like CouchDB, which is something, you know, was a solution we

[01:04:10] came up with for mobile apps. It’s doing replication. You know, one of the services is even a Cloudflare service.

[01:04:23] Yeah, single node, single write. This is how you would think it would work. But there’s like, this kind of goes into like three, you know, D1, CloudFlare, D1, Terso, and LightFS, which is using, what’s it called? Fuse. Fuse, if you don’t know what Fuse is, Fuse, yeah. Fuse was like the thing back in early Linux days I was going to make it so that you could use your Linux box with any Windows network. And I use Fuse like a maniac. It actually works over SSH, too. It was really cool. I was mapping drives on my servers over SSH using Fuse. Jesus Christ. I was an idiot. Anyways, SQLite, I guess, is like a thing. There are these services out there now where this is your database. This is what you’re using and it’s you can have regional replication and all this cool coolness um i don’t know man seems weird i don’t know what these kids are doing these days with their time but yeah they’re telling

[01:05:39] ai to make sql 8 production ready exactly.

[01:05:45] I know i did that i did that john john messaged me because hey what’s this repo i’m like oh yeah uh i can’t remember what the hell it’s called now i’m gonna pull it up github it was obsidian to to do a bridge or something yeah so john’s like hey what the hell is this repo obsidian Todoist Sync Reborn. That’s what it’s called. I’m like, oh yeah, that.

[01:06:15] So I’ve been using Obsidian a lot. And I’m a huge Todoist person. Like, crazy and so i uh i i i apparently spelled fork wrong but that’s awesome um i uh that that’s the way they spell it in in england and oh sorry uh so there’s there’s this great plugin out there called the ultimate to-do list sync for obsidian and it basically you you can you can create to-do items in your obsidian document and it would create them a to-do list and then you can when you mark them as complete either in to-do list or obsidian it would sync that information i loved it it was my favorite thing it stopped working and it stopped working like a while back and i kept saying yeah whatever you know i’ll just keep doing the updates and somebody i’ll fix it and it wasn’t fixed like yesterday i’m like i’m so tired of this shit and so i i track it down i go to the repo, and there’s all these people. Basically, what happened was Todoist changed their APIs.

[01:07:26] They deprecated an old API, and the way API tokens were being processed changed. So this plugin was broken, which is fine. But if you looked at the repo of the plugin, it hadn’t been touched in over three years. Not only that, and this is my biggest gripe about open-source maintainers. Not only that, but people had already figured out this problem, had already corrected it, and submitted PRs, pull requests, to merge in to the code base to fix it. And just wasn’t getting done. And I just like… Oh, you know, and so I, I forked it. I’m like, all right, I’m just going to fork this. I’m going to sit clawed on it. Cause I don’t, I don’t know how to do TypeScript. I don’t know how to do this stuff. I’m going to sit clawed on it for, for a little while. And if it figures it out, I’ll use it. And it figured it out and I started using it. I’m like, cool. This is cool. This is awesome. It works. And so I was using

[01:08:29] it and I didn’t care. And then I’m like.

[01:08:34] Yeah, I should. I should probably submit this. So I actually opened up, I opened up a pull request to Obsidian to pull this repo in. And I don’t know if they’re going to, and I don’t care if they do or not, because I’m using it. It works for me. But I’m like, I felt dirty, man. I’ll be honest with you. I felt dirty. Cause I like, you know, my big thing, you have to take ownership over the code. You have to understand what the code’s doing, how it’s doing it. I don’t. i honestly don’t and i don’t care that much about it like it’s not it’s not a money thing for me like this isn’t a client this isn’t client work this is just a plugin i wanted to get working for me it’s working for me right i could i could have not shared it but i don’t know i feel like i should try to share it so yeah man let me see oh it got merged oh my god did it really no it’s still open your colors are wrong oh my god okay,

[01:09:39] Okay. Yeah, I finished doing all their PR templating crap. Okay. Yeah, you’re right. It’s still open. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so yeah, I opened up a pull request.

[01:09:57] Fun stuff. I don’t think my elephant.me pull a request ever got pulled in either. Nobody loves me, John. I’m the joke of the community. Rodney Dangerfield of the community. No respect, John. No respect what is it PHP elephants, elephants.me let me see if that one got pulled in I always gotta go this way because I forget where the thing does get up dude it’s only 82 days until tech, dude what oh I need to yell at you about that by the way 82 why because you uh you took look at this crap so what the hell come on man, since September last year come on at least get the blue sky and mastodon crap fix now they can’t you got to resolve your conflicts in the composer lock file they no no no that that’s because that’s because this is an upgrade to php 12 which requires an update to php so their github workflow is failing because no you have a merge you have a merge conflict now they’ve they’ve merged something else in with a composer change so you have to,

[01:11:09] those bastards you’re gonna have to rebase on top of theirs, you’re not gonna be able to resolve it because of the lock file.

[01:11:19] Bastards,

[01:11:22] Oh, whatever. I need to look at it. Oh.

[01:11:29] Um, you’re going to yell at me about tech. PHP. What the hell? You know, I broke the site. I know that I got to fix it. You broke the site, John. You broke the site. I know. Do you know though? I do know.

[01:11:46] What’s the, I want to see the schedule.

[01:11:50] Yeah. Oh, so it’s, fixed-ish, but it’s still broken. It’s because there’s stupid sessionized JavaScript code can only show the speakers. They can only show one thing at a time. Really? Yeah. There’s some sort of conflict. We had the same issue last year when we separated. We wanted to show the keynotes separate from everybody else. I had the same issue there.

[01:12:21] It’s going to have to be a link off to another the page or spend some time hacking to show you fixed it last year though how’d you fix it last year um i don’t recall it’s gotta be a fix for it all right yeah yeah that that blows, i should need a php oh did you fix it you didn’t fix this either damn it john fix what I don’t know.

[01:12:50] Oh yeah that was yeah you guys just talked about that today i thought you said you were gonna go fix it i’ll fix it right i’ll fix it right after the podcast sorry shane, it’s eric’s fault it’s all eric’s fault he would john was so quick to throw me under the bus today i’m like god damn what are you talking about you reached out and you’re like john pulling up well because it was the scheduling thing so i was like i don’t i don’t mess with schedules man i that’s That’s your thing. So I was just making sure you caught it. I was like, yeah, no, Eric said he was going to review this and he didn’t.

[01:13:28] It’s all his fault, not mine for sure.

[01:13:32] It’s the way it goes. All right. Wow. That was a lot. Seeing how I didn’t have anything on my trailer board this morning. I know that was a lot. We blasted through a lot. Thank you everybody for hanging out with us and putting up with that. That was a lot of. a crap there,

[01:13:52] and that goes there I can’t decide I can’t decide about how I feel about this new overlap John.

[01:14:05] Kind of like the other way but yeah I think I don’t care enough at the end of the day well that’s your problem you just don’t care about our people you say that all the time all the time I like I like that better. Although I did, I also switched from top to bottom to bottom to top. So like, cause it’s like, it used to be like this. So the top,

[01:14:29] Yeah, I think I like that better. You guys let me know. Look, we can even change the thing here. All right. I like that.

[01:14:37] He’s off. He’s off the schedule now. I like that you see the avatars. I mean, you stick to keep it with the avatars. Yeah.

[01:14:48] I agree. I like that much better. Yeah, me too. Yeah, definitely for sure that. I’ll just keep it like that. I think that works best. I tried to get the production crew backstage to do that. Do something like this and they said no so we’ll just do it ourselves live on the show.

[01:15:05] Yeah i think i’ll stick with that i like that i mean that’s how it was before right that’s exactly how actually no this is cleaner oh is that cleaner because of the cards before it was just a scrolling thing now they’re like individual cards oh okay i don’t think that’s how it was before i like it looks good everybody’s faces only we had a trove of past videos to go check to see how it was but we don’t we talked about phpc.tv right yeah we talked about that last week i think yeah all right cool we did that’s it i’m out of stuff i got nothing else on my board worth talking about yeah i gotta try and get some stuff done before bowling bowling bowling whatever all right uh thanks everybody for hanging out thanks everyone we see you guys see everybody next week, I guess. Sounds good. Let’s do it. Bye. Bye.

[01:16:02] 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	February 26, 2026
Hosted by	Eric Van Johnson, John Congdon
Guest(s)

The PHP Podcast 2026.02.26

Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered:

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