The PHP Podcast 2026.05.07

🎙️ PHP Podcast – May 7, 2026

Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon

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

🎪 PHP Tek Is 11 Days Away — And Everyone Is Stressed
The conference countdown is real: 11 days, 10 hours, and a handful of seconds on the clock. John’s travel plans hinge entirely on little league baseball — if his team wins their Tuesday playoff game, he coaches the Saturday game, then bolts for the airport. If they lose Tuesday, he’s sad but gets to Chicago earlier. Meanwhile, Eric is grinding through the PHP Tek TV redesign, trying to wire up the SessionIze API for schedule imports instead of doing it all manually from a CSV, and sending the design team a novel’s worth of badge and signage requests. Holly’s conference app now has notifications working: select a talk, and if Eric or John move it around, you’ll get pinged. Keynote and lunch notifications are also on the table for attendees who can never find the room.

😰 Conference Stress Dreams: The Motorcycle Gunman Edition
John woke up mid-dream to his wife opening the blinds for the school run — and the dream he was pulled from was genuinely unhinged. He was in an Uber waiting for Uber Eats to arrive at an intersection when a motorcyclist pulled up behind them, got off, shot out the tire, then came to John’s door and started shooting at the lock to get in. The Uber app had briefly flashed the word “threat” on the map. John laid the seat back as far as it would go. The driver just stood there. Then the blinds opened and it was just a Thursday morning. John’s verdict: it’s conference stress. Hard to argue with that.

🎟️ JS Tek — An Honest Conversation
John decided to say the quiet part out loud: JS Tek hasn’t brought in the JavaScript community the way they hoped. The PHP world is unusual in paying for speaker travel and hotel rooms; Joe in Discord confirmed this barely happens outside PHP, and somebody speaking at a Ruby/Rails conference once told Eric they not only weren’t reimbursed for travel — they had to buy their own conference ticket. Eric’s takeaway: the JS track itself is a great idea for PHP developers, but trying to recruit an entirely new community into the fold didn’t work out. Next year’s structure will probably look different.

🔧 The PHP 7-to-8 Upgrade That Failed Three Times
Eric’s consulting team has been struggling with a client upgrade from PHP 7 to 8 — unusual, because they’ve done this many times and know the pitfalls. After three failed attempts, a deep dive revealed the culprit: an abandoned Laravel Shift branch left behind by a previous developer who had started an upgrade and walked away, with missing config files baked right into the inherited codebase. The fix wasn’t just another attempt — it was getting the management team to produce a proper testing playbook, and more importantly, actually getting trained on the application. The team had been fixing bugs in code they’d never seen working correctly. Today they finally got that training session, and Eric says the excitement and “ah-ha” moments from his developers made it clear this should have happened much sooner.

🗄️ The Database on the Same Server Problem
A related discovery from the same client: the database lives on the same machine as the application. Every upgrade means shutting the app down, exporting the database, migrating it somewhere else, and starting over. Eric’s head doesn’t compute why this is still the case in 2026. Even a second machine designated as a database server would be a massive improvement. In a moment of uncomfortable honesty, Eric also admitted that PHP Architect’s own conference site has the same setup — Forge makes it so easy to throw a database on the same box that you just don’t think about it, until you do.

☁️ Laravel Shift, Laravel Cloud, and the Pre-Check Tool
The conversation circled back to Laravel Shift — JMAC’s automated upgrade tool — which Eric notes has become less essential as Laravel’s upgrade paths have smoothed out considerably compared to the wild west of early Laravel development. But Shift is still out there and still useful. More interestingly, JMAC has a new free Shift specifically for Laravel Cloud readiness: run it against your app and it’ll tell you whether your application is compatible with Laravel Cloud’s serverless model, flag any system commands that won’t be available, and help you understand what services you’d need. Laravel Cloud itself is Taylor’s “don’t worry about servers” deployment platform, and if you’re not a sysops person, having a Shift that holds your hand through the setup could be the difference between trying it and not.

🐘 PHP Internals Made Readable — Externals and PHP RFC Watch
Eric plugged two tools for following what’s happening in PHP core. The first is externals.io — a much more readable front-end for the PHP internals mailing list, with search, read-tracking, and threaded discussions. The second is a newer discovery: php-rfc.watch, which focuses purely on RFCs, showing what’s active, what’s been voted on, and how the votes broke down. It’s more of a quick-glance dashboard than a full discussion forum. Eric also highlighted a specific RFC from Ben Ramsey: a proposal to update the PHP license, accompanied by a detailed blog post called “PHP License Simplified” that walks through the history and rationale. If you’ve ever been curious about why license choice matters (especially at the enterprise level where legal teams block open source based on license type), Ben’s post is worth the read.

⚡ NeoVim’s Flash Plugin — Used Wrong for Years
Eric has been using Flash.nvim, a NeoVim navigation plugin, for years. He recently discovered he had been using it completely incorrectly the entire time. He thought he understood what it did. He did not. A YouTube video explaining the plugin properly (titled something like “How to Jump Anywhere Instantly in NeoVim”) revealed that what he’d been doing was essentially pressing the wrong keybinding and stumbling through a fraction of the plugin’s actual functionality. This sent the conversation into a longer Vim origin story: Eric learned Vim because he was flying around the country installing Cyborg firewalls on remote servers and Vi was just there. John picked it up at an enterprise job and never thought about alternatives until he saw a developer using MacVim to write Rails and had his mind blown. The core message: you can use a tool for decades and still be using it wrong, and that’s okay — but watch the tutorial.

🎂 Eric Doesn’t Know How Old He Is
Eric has been confidently telling people for a full year that he’s 55. His wife Bek has known for some time that this is not correct. The moment of reckoning came when Eric asked Alexa: “If I was born in 1969, how old would I be now?” Alexa hedged on the birthday thing but confirmed the range. Bek stepped in. Alexa, a full 30-60 seconds later, stepped back in and confirmed: “Your birthday’s May 8th, you’re turning 57.” Eric is apparently going directly from 55 to 57, having skipped 56 entirely. He also noted at the Padres game with his wife that their Costco membership is older than a 13-year-old kid they saw on the Jumbotron, and that it could legally babysit him. John is turning 50 this year. Everyone is fine.

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John Congdon

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Transcript

[03:55] 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.

[04:12] You you you.

[04:25] I got really bad at this job. Well, I thought they were off on that scene, so I thought I could turn them on so they’d be ready when we came back to this scene. Oh, I can see what you’re thinking.

[04:37] That was my plan. I forgot to set this scene up anyways. Oh, my gosh. We’re getting close, John. I said 11 days. Yeah, that can’t be right, can it? Can it be right? I don’t know. That’s what it says.

[04:56] What’s sarah come on okay oh never mind, what’s up here sarah’s being mean sarah’s always being mean 11 days 10 hours i don’t know if i forget how i’m doing the conversion here i’m sure we make her want to spit on us oh every every week yeah say something stupid oh my gosh man i don’t know what we got this conference thing happening i guess yeah so if this is your first time joining us you’re listening to php architect podcast eric and i talk about development running a business which we try to do not so well terrible web design because we have our 2026 behind the about when you scale it to that size yeah.

[05:54] It happens and we do consulting we have a small business here in San Diego well we’re in San Diego Southern California and our team is spread out around the world.

[06:08] And sorry I’m so distracted by discord if you want to join us join us over on our discord channel over at discord.phprch.com or you too can make fun of me,

[06:21] there we go that’s better yeah we do run a conference php tech coming up here in just 11 days 10 hours 52 minutes and a few seconds eric and i were talking before the show about my uh my flight plans are going to be really tight around little league baseball hopefully mark we start playoffs on tuesday night. And if we win, we play Saturday and I think I can still coach the game, leave as soon as the game is over and make it to the airport before I fly out.

[07:00] If we lose on Tuesday, if we lose on Tuesday, then I miss the second game and I’m sad.

[07:09] Well, you’ll win. So it’ll be fine. Also, we’d like to thank our partners over at code rabbit for, um, making this podcast a little better. Uh, we’re going to talk about code rabbit a little bit later as well.

[07:22] Oh man. We got the, uh, we got the, um, April issue out. Yeah. We got the April issue out, But we’re still working on May, right? Yeah, we’re working on May. Yep. May’s been around. I did order the magazines for the conference. So if you are going to be in person at the conference, you will get a print copy in your swag bag if we do bags. Somehow you will have a print copy. And you’ll have a new elephant as well. Holly. We’re calling the new elephant Holly. After Holly, who has gone above and beyond helping John and I with organizing this conference and building the application. I worked with Holly a little bit this week on getting the notification piece work. And so if you’re on the test, if you’re on the beta program, there’s an update out there that will have notifications working. There’s, no notifications right now it’s just going to notify you if you select a talk and it goes into your schedule so it’s

[08:25] basically you saying that’s a talk you want to go to you select a talk it goes in your schedule if we modify that talk like move it around you’ll get a notification and it’ll let you know it’s been moved around jen and i also talking about um i mean obviously we’re not going to abuse it or anything but we do get a lot of uh feedback every year about people who didn’t know like the keynotes had started or lunch was starting. So we’re talking about maybe sending out notifications through that app, letting people know keynotes started, lunches being served. But that’s going to be it. We also use Discord. So if you’re going and you’re not in our Discord channel that’s our primary method of communication at the conference as well. Yeah. You can still get a virtual pass and you be there virtually.

[09:19] I don’t want to throw the first game. I want to win the first game so that I can be at the second game. That’s the whole point.

[09:27] I throw the first game. The second game would be Saturday night. I’ve already landed in Chicago.

[09:35] So what’s that, John? Yeah, this is one of the new Padre hats. The San Diego Padres are adopting our orange,

[09:46] we’ve had that kind of impact on the city absolutely yeah they were saying what is this PHP architect and what is with that beautiful orange and now they have a bunch of orange hats which I actually haven’t seen them wear in the field yet but I bought a few,

[10:04] it’s coming don’t worry I was wearing our new uh, oh.

[10:13] Vim for developers who don’t quit that looks better in person not in person but when you’re as you’re wearing it everything looks better on me john i actually get that comment a lot where people would prefer me to have clothes on than off because just looks that much better, so on store.phbr.com when i’ve seen that shirt the letters in the middle look like there would be very hard to read but yeah it’s easy to read yeah they stand out just fine yeah i like this one i like the quality a lot too, so yeah store.phprs.com it’s your geek swag on yeah uh hoping we have t-shirts coming for tech this year and we are hoping they will be there on time because the last minute i’m getting, to the the vendor uh so i want to i’ll thank them i want to thank clayton kendall for providing the shirts again this year they did last year as well and looking forward to seeing them there oh we need to get their logo up on the site too,

[11:21] Yeah, I was going to make note of that. I’m not very, I’m probably actually going to do that. I should have sent that off to the design team. We’ll get it in before we print anything, I guess. Yeah.

[11:35] How’s your week been? It’s been okay. Like I said, I spent some time with Holly working on the mobile app, which is fun. It’s a lot of components to it because it’s, she wrote it native. So it’s Swift on iOS and Kotlin on Android. And then there’s a backend component as well. Obviously that’s what’s helping store everything, but yeah, it’s fun. Just a lot of, a lot of moving pieces to, to, to work on. And I, again, I can’t think Holly enough for stepping up and doing that for us, but yeah, I’m excited to have that. Besides that yeah just i i’ve been grinding away on the php tech tv site the last couple days testing stuff out because i’ve done that big redesign and just making sure everything still works the way it’s supposed to and i think so the only thing i actually haven’t tested is just make sure the live streams kick in which i still need to do that it’s just it’s kind of a pain to do because i’ve got i’ve got like manually

[12:49] reset all the schedules so that you know it thinks that there’s a live stream happening and then it knows to go look for the live stream and then i also have to actually stream something for it to pick up so yeah i gotta gotta get all that done but it’s getting there i’m happy i’m really disappointed in myself because i made a very strong push um Mm-mm. A couple of weeks ago to try to get the rewrite for phparch.com done. And I got really far along, really far along to the point now where it’s like. Everything that’s left to do is like the important stuff, like making sure subscriptions get captured correctly, make sure your magazines are accessible, like all that. And I don’t know. I just, I just ran out of, ran out of time, ran out of steam, had too many other things to do. The, the conferences, the, the PHP tech TV, it’s just been stressing me for the last few weeks. And, um,

[13:56] Yeah, I keep saying every year, I say it about the same time every year. I’ve got to tie this into the SessionEyes APIs because several, several years ago now, I guess back in 2023. When we started, yeah.

[14:15] Back in 2023, when we first decided to bring the conference back, that PHP Tech TV was very much a last minute thing. We did a bunch of guerrilla coding and we patched it together and it was like literally the first couple of days of the conference was john and i fixing all the bugs of the dm site so that it would stream but you know i i just there’s been a lot of things that i haven’t been happy with the way it was done i’ve been slowly fixing it and fixing it but the one thing that i always procrastinate on because i don’t think about it is the importing of the speakers in the talks is a manual process, but it doesn’t need to be. Like there’s an API endpoint I can hit and grab. And I just haven’t done that yet. And I think I can get it done before the conference this year. I just need to like buckle down and do it because I have to rewrite how the imports are done because I did it all based off of a specific format, you know, a CSV file.

[15:19] So now I’ve got to grab the JSON, find out where the fields are, and write another importer.

[15:26] It’ll be fine. I mean, either way. But yeah, just stressed out, man. Stressed out. Howie’s asking if we want the streams to be in the app, and they’ll make it happen. Yeah, they keep asking. So, yeah, I don’t think this time around, only because the people at the conference… Would be the ones that are using the app and they’re there so yeah but virtual could use it too if they have the app and we move time slots around they’ll know they’ll get notified i guess they could watch while they’re going to the bathroom let’s see then then we we get down to the whole authentication process right so we have to authenticate them against php tech tv to make sure they have permission to watch the stream that’s true i kind of had sidestepped that because. We were kind of working on it uh the whole idea is to make things easier for the attendees, and quite honestly i got too much stuff going on right

[16:30] now to try to uh set up um authentication right i mean i just i just don’t feel like it so uh because how to holly’s defense she’s been pushing she’s been pushing she’s been pushing me she’s like yeah you know let’s do it this way let’s do it this way i’m like yeah i don’t want to do that much work right now can we do that right now it’s not that you don’t want to do that much work it’s you got you have to focus on some other things right now right and that’s only half like you know i i had to send this like novel to our design group of oh yeah by the way we need badges we need signs we need you know room signs we need oh man it’s just like there’s so many things going on so anyways go ahead i was gonna say on top of that things constantly are changing too like schedule changing we’ve had a couple speakers back out for various reasons i have a speaker that has not replied in a couple of months to anything so i’ve reached out via

[17:36] email and via linkedin so i think we have two more slots that are going to be open here very soon. Frustrating. So you asked me if I was stressed.

[17:47] I was woken up this morning in the middle of a dream. In this dream, I somehow got into an Uber, but I was waiting for Uber Eats to bring me some food. But I’m in a different Uber. And the guy was annoyed with me. He’s like, well, are they coming in up here at this intersection? I’m like, I’m looking at the app, the Uber apps, and I’m tracking it on the way. And I’m like, yeah, they’re going to be. And he’s like, well, traffic is really slow right there. I’m going to pull up over there. So it’s like down the road a little bit And as we’re pulling up to this intersection Looking in the app on the map I see the word threat go by, I’m like, that’s weird. It’s just identifying cars as threats. But it was a motorcycle. The motorcycle goes around the back of the car. The guy gets off the motorcycle with a gun and shoots the tire.

[18:43] And then comes over to the passenger side door where I’m sitting and shoots the, like, trying to shoot the key. Kind of like trying to shoot the keyhole out to open the door. Because for some reason, the driver’s just standing there looking at him like he’s crazy and then hits the lock button. The locks on the doors and i’m freaking out i like pull the the lever on the seat and like lay all the way back as the guy and then points at the window to shoot at the the lock you know the old style locks where you pull the lock up so he’s not trying to shoot at that.

[19:15] It’s got to be stress right yeah i’m pretty sure as he’s shooting at that my wife had, in real life open the blinds to wake us up in the morning because got to get ready for school and stuff and it was such a weird dream yeah it stresses uh stresses the word oh man yeah,

[19:41] so yeah anyways yeah there’s gonna be an app um holly is in our discord so everybody think holly, but uh holly is the app public now is it in the play store i guess i could go check huh i happen to be in there for a completely separate reason so i could i could tell you.

[20:09] As well you’re doing development this this week i have been on a couple of things, the vendor app is there which needs to be updated and, Yeah, it’s still in prepare for submission.

[20:28] Yeah, development-wise, currently working on getting code base up to PHP 8.5. So just released 8.5 onto the develop server.

[20:43] Had to open three or four different pull requests to get the code base up and ready for php 8.5.

[20:54] Separately the person who got the server up and running logged into their account and they’re like there’s this wall of logs in the in the um uh in the app log no errors on the screen like everything was working but it was just hundreds of errors and i started researching it and i couldn’t figure it out because i’m logging into my account it’s everything’s fine turns out he had a weird setting on his account and i’m like i think this is happening on php 8.4 as well like it’s not a 8.5 thing it’s just there’s something there’s a bug here yes and it’s the way is being handled afterwards it’s just noise in the log so i was able to code around it pretty easily yeah but it’s just like why did we do it that way like trying to pull a record without an id, and then based on that record we say hey does this record have an id oh no let’s return false and move on well we could check to see if there’s an id before trying to get the record.

[22:00] It’s so dumb how do dang it twitch,

[22:06] That’s why I hate having all the different accounts going at the same time. Oh, me too. Yeah. Oh, you can ban through, uh, restream too, can’t you? I always forget that. I think so. Yeah. Does somebody need to be banned? Yeah.

[22:21] Why? It’s probably somebody on Twitch, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s always Twitch. Yeah. Oh, I got it right here. We will add to block list and restream. Yeah, exactly. But it doesn’t come off of the screen. That’s what I don’t like. So weird. Does it not? It might, it might on the delay. I don’t know. We’ll see. Well, I guess you’re right. I guess it doesn’t. Yeah. We don’t, we’re not delayed on our screen. Yeah, that’s true. So if you do, whoops. Well, screw that up. No, no, There you go. There you go. He was, he’s got the right idea. Just, just, uh, spamming the chat. Just put a wall of text up there. Oh, it was got his, Oh, I did mean that I was trying to click on that link. Then I remembered that wasn’t discord. This is actually discord every year. Is this the one you did last year? It was, or somebody, somebody written last year. Nope. That’s, this is this year here. Let me share this. It was a little article

[23:29] career tip attended conference.

[23:32] Oh, I love these. John was just talking about how we didn’t do any blog posts this year for the conference website, which obviously I kind of, I was going to, but I really didn’t think anybody was taking advantage of it last year. So I didn’t worry about it. Not only did we not write them, they’re not available on the site, but there’s a lot of good content from last year that’s still relevant, like getting from the airport to the hotel. They’re not on the site at all? No. No.

[24:03] And I, I know that and I didn’t go looking for it. I mean, I didn’t go looking at it. My kid is peeking around the corner at me for some reason. Oh, that can’t be good. No, it’s fine. He’s being silly. Oh yeah. I guess you’re right. Shoot. That’s weird. Oh, you know where I think it is? I think it’s on, I think it’s on PHP tech. I know it’s somewhere. Cause I was looking at the other day. I’m like, damn, we didn’t do that. We didn’t do this. Yeah. It’s on PHP tech TV.

[24:32] That’s where it’s at. yeah last last year when we had multiple pages it was part of the site as well and this year we tried to do a single page thing it’s yeah i don’t know i i thought i thought the single page worked but yeah you’re right we should we should have we should have kept a blog on there i guess because it does have some good good tips on getting around town.

[24:57] Maybe we’ll do that this weekend. I’ll try to find some time this weekend and add it. And the Cubs are in town, too. Cubs are in town. They’re playing the Brewers Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then they’re playing somebody on Friday. And I haven’t really nailed down what day. It really depends on how quick we get set up and how smooth the setup goes.

[25:20] But, yeah, I’m looking forward to taking my kid to a Cubs game.

[25:29] Like I said, if nothing else, I’ll probably go to that other professional league that they have that’s literally like two miles from the hotel. I can, I might slip in and catch one of those games, but yeah. I’m going to put Andy’s, you know, I called him, just called you Andy, Andrew. Sorry about that. I’m going to put Andrew’s thing in the show notes for people listening to the audio podcast link to Andrew’s LinkedIn blog post. Career tip, attend a conference. He just kind of goes through the benefits and all that. I’m not sure if he calls us out by name. No, look at that. He doesn’t. Oh, there at the very bottom. He says we’re here. All right. That’s cool. I’ll let that slide, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Mr. Woods. you’re talking this year you’re on the speaker list I believe, right am I wrong I think I’m right you are wrong I’m wrong you are wrong what you got his hopes all up I did,

[26:44] I mean, we’ve got some spots to fill.

[26:48] Oh, damn it. Sorry. Sorry. Well, Andrew has spoken for us in the past. Yeah.

[26:56] I want to apologize right now to people attending. It’s going to be part of our opening, but beverages are not going to be all day like they have been in the past. We had to make that tough decision to… Make it half day. So coffee and sodas will be available until lunchtime. And, uh, just so you guys know, we’re not sacrificing that. That wasn’t the first thing we’ve sacrificed. We had to let the speakers know that there was going to be a speaker to this year, because that’s one of the bigger expenses, like out of pocket expenses. And we can only really do it if a sponsor steps up and says, yeah, we’ll sponsor a speaker dinner. And unfortunately we didn’t get that this year and we tried, uh, We actually hired somebody to do a bunch of marketing for us. And I know they tried. So it’s just one of those things. So, yeah, we’re just trying to make it as good of an experience for everybody.

[27:55] But, yeah, coffee goes away at lunchtime, right after lunch, right? Right. Yeah, right after lunch, which is fine. I don’t think a whole lot of people go for it.

[28:06] But the amount they charged for coffee and drinks was absolutely insane so here’s my thing right like as much as we’re paying for it it should be okay we’re not going to restock it after this time like you guys can finish because the coffee’s already made like let us finish the coffee you know i get okay maybe if you want to take the soda cans back or whatever i’m still i’m sure we’re still paying for them but like just don’t you don’t just don’t take it away just don’t refill it just keep it there right maybe they will but i doubt it i’m sure it’s gonna hit time and they’re gonna be like all right get it in they’re not paying for it anymore yeah.

[28:52] So, we had, we’ll keep doing this because we’ve been asked to. We realize a lot of people here know we have a consulting group at PHP Architect. But if you didn’t know, we do have a consulting group here at PHP Architect. We augment teams. We are total replacements. I’m sorry. We don’t come in and replace teams. We have become the IT group of some of our clients where they just hire us and they don’t worry about augmenting anything. But the challenge I have discovered… Over these years, that augmenting teams is one of the more challenging pieces, right? Because, like, there are systems in place and everybody has, like, a knowledge of stuff. And for, like, new people to kind of come in, I don’t know, it’s just like this weird thing. And we’ve had one client that, I mean, yes, we kind of augment their team, but also, yeah, I guess technically we’re augmenting their existing team, but their existing team is pretty small.

[30:11] And, you know, we’ve struggled to deliver to them, like the level of work that we are accustomed to delivering. Like we’re used to like kind of being the badasses, like understanding all the ins and outs and getting deep into the code and figuring everything out. And we’ve been doing that, but there’s like just been something off like things have been seen seeming to like trigger exactly correct and like the the big the thing that really brought this to light is we we’ve been trying to upgrade their version of php and this is something we’ve done several times and we know the pitfalls and we know what to look for like this is this is nothing this is nothing out of the unusual for us. John, how do you hang up on a car? Just click a button. Okay. No, it won’t hang up. It’ll just silence the ringing.

[31:12] So for whatever reason, every time we tried to do this upgrade, it just wasn’t working. It was really unusual for us. So the first time it failed, it’s like, all right, we missed something. It happens. Let’s regroup. Let’s figure it out. And let’s get this upgrade done. And so we thought we had done that. And the second time failed. And that is really unusual for us. like almost to the pat to the point where you know i’m like i don’t know what to do at this point you’ve probably twice announced more but we kind of followed the same playbook okay wait a second step back regroup look at everything they’re coming from like seven to eight so it’s not even like this crazy jump in inversioning like it is a major release but it’s not like they’re not coming from four to eight you know it’s nothing like that and so we try a third time and we failed a third time and that is like when basically john and john and

[32:13] i were both like wait a minute there’s like something’s wrong here like this is not correct and fortunately you know the team did a deep dive into the code uh they found like this old laravel shift that one of the developers had started before they left and i guess before we ever came on so so it was existing in the code base a a new branch to upgrade to eight four or eight two whatever it was which was handed over to us right right so it was like so they had done a deep dive and they they discovered like a bunch of abnormal things with that upgrade. Like config files missing and stuff. So.

[33:02] Instead of saying, okay, let’s regroup and try again, we took a different approach and we kind of engaged the management team and said, hey, you know, we try not to put our foot down too much with clients because, you know, they pay us money and we like that and we don’t want to upset them. But occasionally we have, and with one of our other clients where we had a similar issue with every time we tried to release something, we’d have to pull it back out because it got, it would have failed because it wasn’t tested properly. So what we did with that client, especially for big efforts, we told him, hey, you know, can you guys come up with a playbook on exactly what you’re going to test so that we can test it? And, you know, we can kind of make sure everything works before we hand it off to you. And then we know what you’re testing. And so if anything’s missed, like if something’s broken, we know that it’s been

[33:59] missed in the testing and we’ll just have to write tests for it. And that that’s worked out really good for us um it kind of slows down the process a little bit in in the beginning but it it speeds it up because like when we release things now we’re pretty confident with the release cycle so we kind of went to the management team and said hey, we really need you guys to do a playbook for us for testing and while you’re at it. Uh we’ve never really been trained on what your product is like we we get tossed bugs and say hey this isn’t doing this correctly fix it and we fix it but we don’t really know how to test it like, we don’t know how you guys might be an application might be able to test that one piece because we can see it but as a hey go go use the whole application it was not done well because when we were brought on board, there was a developer and he was training one other person who’s not really

[35:00] a developer, but trying to train them to help him out. And shortly after we joined, that person left out of frustration. I mean, they’d been there for. 20 years yeah and they they finally just had enough and they walked away knowing that they brought us on board to be there but there was a whole lot of upheaval at that point so no we weren’t trained management was happy we were there but all they cared about was the application kept running not that we knew how to use it yeah so now it’s at a point where it’s like we we gave it to them, hey, test this. And when they come back and say, good to go, we’re like, all right, let’s deploy. Shit has a fan. What do you do, right? At that point, all you can do is roll back. Hey, Sean Mays in our Discord, or actually in Facebook. Hey, Sean, haven’t talked to you in forever. Hope things are going well. He’s the PHP guy, or was like the PHP guy in Vancouver.

[36:02] I think he’s kind of stepped away from that aspect of things. But yeah, so anyways, our team got trained today, as a matter of fact, on it. And it’s just, it’s so good to see the feedback from the team members of how excited they were. You can kind of tell, and this is on me. I mean, I should have insisted on this sooner. but like it not only did things make sense to them, but, They realized like the way certain things were being conveyed to them on like how it was being used, how the app was being used wasn’t exactly correct. Like they learned that, you know, it’s not really being used the way that we thought it was being used. And like some of the areas where they, where they’ve been putting a lot of our liaisons or the people we’ve been working with haven’t put a lot of their focus on is really like something like, yeah, I mean, it’s there, but, nobody really takes advantage of that piece and it’s like okay good to know.

[37:14] So you start to optimize based on that yeah so i’m hopeful i’m hopeful that we’re gonna get, it nailed i i’m i’m almost i don’t want to get cocky but i i’m feeling pretty good about getting this playbook done and getting getting through this upgrade at our lunch next week we need to bring up the database situation database situation i think is a good topic to bring up again this app has been around for a very long time and turns out the database is on the same machine as the app itself so scaling is an issue and upgrading is even worse yeah with the with the way that they are currently doing the upgrades i was in shock when they told me how, We’re bringing up a new instance. We’re migrating the data. And I’m like, but why? That doesn’t make sense. My head just, like, doesn’t compute that you have to shut the app down, export, import the database somewhere else. It’s just like. Yeah, we definitely need to bring that up. And we’re actually, and I get it.

[38:23] Like, database as a service is typically a fairly expensive venture.

[38:31] But I mean, even if you spin up another machine and you just say, hey, this is the database server, you know, that’s still better, which is something we should consider doing, especially for like tech TV. I mean, we do it for like all our clients, but like our main site is like that as well. But like all our little side hustles, like the conference site and stuff, we don’t use a centralized database. And we should. I didn’t. I did not know that. Yeah. I was. Because Forge is easy and Forge is just like throwing a database on here. Yeah. Not only does it let you throw a database on there, but it lets you manage the creation of the databases, schemas. And it lets you manage the users for the database all through Forge, which is a nicety. And when we didn’t have a Joe, that was really kind of good. And like I said, like initially, like the conference website, it was like, I don’t need, you know,

[39:37] RDS for this, you know, I’ll just throw it on the machine and, but yeah, this, this made me think about that a little bit. Yeah. Okay. Let’s take a moment. Cause we’re kind of in deep here and we haven’t talked about our good people over at CodeRabbit.

[40:00] Thank you to our partners over at CodeRabbit for sponsoring this episode. Code reviews are critical but time-consuming. CodeRabbit acts as your AI copilot, providing instant code review comments and potential impacts of every pull request. Beyond just flagging issues, CodeRabbit provides one-click, fixed suggestions and lets you define custom code quality rules using AST grep patterns, catching subtle issues that traditional static analysis tools might miss. CodeRabbit reviews 1 million PRs every week across 3 million repositories and is used by 100,000 open source projects. CodeRabbit is free for all open source repos. Get started today by visiting phpa.me forward slash CodeRabbit. Again, that is phpa.me forward slash CodeRabbit.

[40:59] Thanks code rabbit you code rabbit did you like my response to you john i i submitted a pr to the tech website and john’s like yeah man code rabbit’s suggesting some changes i’m like yeah this we’re archiving this site like two weeks i don’t care push it live,

[41:21] i i approved i bullied him into approving laughing, i’m used to it bully yeah it’s my thing okay we’ve talked about a lot of things um and some of it i wanted to kind of get back around because i kind of have a ticket uh for one of them we talked about laravel shift um and the the coming intel code base that was kind of mid-shift that hadn’t really been you know completely vetted out not knocking shift we’re a big supporter of jmac and shift for years uh we have you know we’ve definitely used shift more times than not i i don’t think shift is is as big of a deal as it used to be because the the upgrade paths are so less aggressive than they used to be.

[42:18] The framework would be rewritten between not even major upgrades. It’s just like, oh yeah, we decided to pull all this out and put all this in. It was still young and a baby and Taylor’s like, I’ve been using it a lot and now I think if it worked this way, it’d be even better. So it just matched his style as he kept growing. Well, and then you started getting people, really talented developers like Nuno involved who were like, oh, hey, I want to rewrite Eloquent. I don’t think Nuno rewrote Eloquent, but somebody at one point had basically rewritten Eloquent from top to bottom. And I remember how appreciative Taylor was of that. But yeah, all that stuff. Anyway, shit is still out there. And Taylor also listened to us in our previous podcast and how we always talked about their sember semantic burgeoning and he listened to us and that’s why it’s a better experience today that’s right we we played a small role in that

[43:22] because we kept shaming him, but yeah shift is still out there um. Laravel Cloud is a thing, if you weren’t aware. I played with it. It’s fine. Like I said, I have a Joe, so that’s basically my Laravel Cloud solution. We do use Forge for that. But anyways, Laravel Cloud is just what it sounds like. Like, you don’t worry about servers anymore. Everything is just a service to you. It’s nice to have. We kind of use a similar approach with one of our bigger clients in AWS where, I mean, they’re still kind of servers. It’s weird. Whatever. Anyways, JMAC has a pre-check. So if you have an application that you want on Laravel Cloud and you’re not sure, you know, if it’s a fit or if it will run in cloud, there’s a free shift you can run that will basically let you know you know if it’s if it’s good to run on cloud and i think the big i mean of course it’s going to be good to run it like if it’s a laravel

[44:29] application it’s going to run on laravel cloud i think uh max taking like a step further and really kind of telling you what what services you need and you know how to do the auto scaling and all those other bells and whistles, which, again, if you’re not a sys ops person and you’re kind of leaning on one of these services, it could still be challenging to implement. And so it sounds like J-Max kind of stepped up and given people a way to kind of just another click, another little helping hand. And I like J-Max. I like to promote his stuff. So he’s looking at if you’re making calls to system commands he knows if those commands will even be available on, Those servers are not nice.

[45:20] Yeah. Yeah, he does a good job. J-Mac punches out some just really good code. Very envious of that guy. I wish I could be nearly as talented as he is, but I’m stuck here living with John instead.

[45:36] I’m holding you back. You’re holding me back, man. Stay here with me. Don’t go anywhere.

[45:44] I have something else I want to talk about. and then we can talk about whatever you want to talk about. Because we are a PHP podcast. If you listen to the show long enough, you’ve heard us talk about externals, right? Externals is pretty cool. If you’re ever curious about PHP once in a while. Yeah.

[46:03] The actual underbelly of PHP, like the internals piece of it and what’s going on in there.

[46:11] You know, this is kind of cool. This is where people will post to when they want to do RFCs. This is you know how how i consume internals now like i i’m still subscribed to the mailing list but i i almost never look at it and i almost i always come here this has a nice little search tool to it uh it will keep track of the articles that you’ve read so like if i i think if i click on this one and then when i go back i think it’s like a different color nope oh there nope i don’t know how it knows but somehow somehow there it goes there it is the font the bold is out so you can kind of look at what you’ve done i came across another site that i didn’t know existed you might have known about this one john just you know holding on to it kind of along those same lines as uh externals is php rfc watch so this is kind of cool uh this you know. It kind of does the same thing externals does, but this is only focused on,

[47:15] uh rfcs and all it does is like link to the rfc so it’s like if you still want to see the chatter that’s happening back and forth through the mailing mail thread uh you have to go to externals but this is kind of i thought this was nice this kind of tells you like what rfcs are out there and active uh i think i mean yeah yeah here you go the ones that that have been voted on it tells you you know what the vote looked like uh this is kind of cool again, we’re pretty deep into this stuff this stuff, we geek out on this stuff, we enjoy it it’s not for everybody, but yeah, if RFCs and understanding what’s coming down the pipeline for the next versions of PHP is something that interests you. Check this out it’ll be in the show notes php-rfc-watch I’m not even going to say all that, I saw that I’m not even sure it’s not even a word, yeah it’ll be in the show notes there you go but yeah check it out externals in

[48:18] rfc watch you’ve got that first uh one right there the php license update uh that came from our good friend ben ramsey and he and he did a whole blog article about how he went about it called the php license simplified and people that understand the various licenses always um i i admire those people because they like know all the ins and outs and i’m like meh i don’t i i’ve never been affected by it as much but i also haven’t worked at large enterprise companies that really care, Which is a thing. It’s a huge, huge thing, right? Yeah. I’ve never had a legal team that I’ve had to answer to if we could use something or not. I was like, that’s open source. It’s good enough for me.

[49:22] Yeah. So the blog post is good.

[49:27] Yeah. Do you have a link to it? I thought it would be in here, but I’m not seeing it in here. Yeah, it’s in Trello. I put it in there. Oh, it’s in Trello? yeah awesome oh was that oh was that this one with the plates on it yeah oh that is ramsey’s like look at it license license plates license plates yeah maryland there’s a maryland one right there i’m a big maryland guy okay well he is he’s a wordy cat isn’t he you know the guy can sit here to write these long ass posts but he can’t write a column for us see that’s that’s what i’m talking about man no this looks good yeah i can’t get into the licenses but i’m glad people like uh ben are around because good god you’re paying the ass yeah that’s my thought too.

[50:22] All right um,

[50:26] yeah that was that was my thing tech has been all up on my head i know like so much to worry about there so much to think about i’m sad i’m sad that we have to make some changes to it this year uh i i don’t know if i if i say it out loud but i will because i had again the show i seem to have no filter.

[50:53] JS tech I thought was a great idea, but unfortunately it’s turned out to not be very good of an idea. At least the JS.

[51:03] Community doesn’t seem to, be as on board so yeah yeah i get where you’re coming from um i. Wouldn’t say it was a bad idea like we’re we’re not part of that ecosystem enough and i think there you know you could take your shoe off and throw it and hit a couple js conferences just in san diego so like j javascript doesn’t seem to have an issue with getting community conferences up all over the place i still think it’s relevant to what we do because we’re in the web industry and so i i like i’m being selfish here so yeah do i wish more javascript developers purchased tickets and came to the conference of course i do like why wouldn’t i but for our people for our community the php community to bring in people non-php people and to do talks on that aspect of web development i think was genius and i’m fine keeping it as its own track uh and again we that’s all it is really is it’s a track we never actually treated it as a separate conference you always we were always

[52:21] going to let people go to you know either conference that they wanted to go to no matter which conference they bought the ticket for so that was never even an issue uh i I just think I’m still not saying it’s a bad idea. I want to see how many PHP developers end up in that track. Right. I think that’s, I think that’s our part is we brought in. A lot of extra speakers to fill a track. So having to pay for travel, pay for hotel and to have no ticket sales that back that up is really hard. And that whole fourth track curse that you seem to bring to the table every other year. Yeah.

[53:09] Yeah. No, I agree. No, no, no, no. But I, I, again, I’m not thinking it’s a bad idea, but yeah, And maybe we should have decided sooner to maybe cut back a track on tech. And so, again, we learned in the past when we tried to do four tracks, that was just too many tracks for that size of a conference. And like what we get as a turnout. And so we thought this would be a little different because we thought we’d be bringing in a whole new community. We just haven’t really seen that happen. Right but you know so yeah we should have just said hey let’s just do you know two php tracks and js tech and then if js tech takes off we can always do another php track but yeah but i i do want to stress like the uh i not everybody not everybody doing a talk on JS, the JS tech track, are non-PHP developers. There are some PHP developers on that side talking. But I do want to let you know that you will be hearing from speakers that you

[54:24] don’t typically hear from a PHP conference. And I hope everybody takes the opportunity to embrace that. Welcome them to our community and take the opportunity to ask questions. I think that was the other hard part. I’m so used to the PHP community and the PHP… Conference vibe where you’re going for the three-day experience you you want to go hang with people you want to be there and to have so many people on that side of the fence the js tech side like oh yeah i’m gonna come in the the day before i speak and leave right after i speak it’s like well then you’re not being part of the community you’re just coming in to talk and yeah i mean thank you for saving me money on a hotel room but.

[55:16] I want you to enjoy the community I want you to get to know us and us to get to know you and all that, maybe somebody who has spoken at more other conferences and PHP conferences can validate this for me but I have heard,

[55:35] Joe mentioned Python tech next year I have heard that like PHP, the PHP community as a whole is unusual in the sense that they pay for their speakers’ travel and hotel room. I talked to somebody back in the day who was speaking at a Ruby event, Was it a Ruby event or a Rails event? I don’t know. I think it might have been a Rails event, but at the very least, it was a Ruby event. So Ruby and Rails is kind of like PHP and Laravel, right? Rails is a framework. Ruby is a language. Anyways, they were like, wait, what? You pay for your speakers to travel? I was like, no. Not only did this conference not pay for travel, not pay for the hotel, they still had to buy a conference ticket. They didn’t even give them a conference ticket. I’m like, what’s the point of speaking? He’s like, because, you know, we’re like, we’re the subject matter experts. People want to hear from us. I’m like, but you’re paying them to work.

[56:42] Joe says paying for speaker travel doesn’t happen outside the PHP. Thank you. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Yeah. So it sounds like we need to make changes next year.

[56:54] Enjoy your flights and hotels while you can.

[56:59] Oh, yeah. Buying your own conference ticket as a Python community thing. See, I’m not crazy. And that seems crazy to me because it’s like, how do they get speakers? Like, what’s the draw? If I’m going to the conference and I’m paying for the conference and I have the option of, you know, going there and absorbing as much knowledge as I can or stressing out because I’m going to be giving a talk, I’m absorbing knowledge man I don’t need that I’ve never been to one so my assumption would be you’re going to get more talks that are kind of sponsored, A company is going to pay you to go talk, speak at a conference to push their products versus where we do general knowledge, trying to be a better developer overall.

[57:53] You’re going to learn about something that’s going to make somebody else money. You know what? I have to be honest. I know we’ve talked about tech a lot today. This used to drive Tom crazy this time of year because tech would be all that John and I talk about. But like we really don’t stress that enough like people think this is a php architect conference and it is like we own php architect our php architect has always sponsored this conference and put it on but it’s never been about selling you any php architect product like we don’t sit here and say oh hey we’re releasing a new service and you know check this out you know it’s like hey you know yeah we have this magazine it’s been in the community forever subscribe But we could never sell enough subscriptions to get any sort of ROI on it, right? So it’s like PHP, it’s always been a community conference about just becoming a better PHP developer.

[58:51] And I don’t know. I feel like that’s a mistake. I mean, I want to be careful with my words. I feel like it’s a mistake from PHP. A business perspective of i work for a company i need to send my developers to a conference, but like the conference is like it’s not being like it’s being run by a company but they’re not selling you anything it’s you know it’s like a hard concept for businesses to get behind like this is just a community con we say it’s a community conference and they say oh you guys are just sitting there you know fucking around like it’s a community conference like no right No, it’s a community conference to make everybody better at development with no upside to anybody.

[59:35] I don’t know, man. I feel like we’re doing it wrong.

[59:39] Well, it does allow us to light some cash on fire every year. Yeah. I mean, it keeps us warm after we cry.

[59:50] All right. It’s four o’clock. How are you on time? You got some time? I got one more thing I want to get off my board. Yeah. No, I’m good. I’m good until uh i got plenty of time i’m going to see my kids play tonight,

[01:00:05] uh that’s my next no they they’re they are in a play they’re doing footloose oh in a play play like theater theater yeah okay i really don’t know how to go about this one um but a while back we talked about how i made the decision to step away from php storm this is not a php storm smash or anything like that i just you know i i was re-evaluating how i was developing and trying to trying to grow with you know how i’m doing things and with using ai you know i’ve been i i fight i have been finding myself in storm less and less and so i’ve, Fired up VS Code. I have this whole thing. I like to be able to direct developers to tools that they can use. Again, if you make money with PHP, don’t ever hesitate to pay for PHP Storm. If you don’t make money with PHP or you don’t have the money to spend, VS Code. So I spent some time with VS Code. For those of you who recommended Zen, I did give that a look.

[01:01:17] It’s cool. you know it has vim motions built in i’m a again a vim guy right so everything has to have vim motions but you know it’s just i couldn’t like tweak it and i really didn’t care enough because what had happened is i started using just straight up in vim again neo vim you know just loved it right like god damn this feels so good and i just started using it and then i started i actually started using claude to help me with some of the paper cuts i had in my neo vim configuration that had always been bugging me and so you know claude like fixed a bunch of stuff and uh got it dialed in i’m just really happy with my vim experience again but like i’ve always had this issue with vim so john has always been a vim user that no plugins no extensions he just raw dogs the vim experience and which is fine. Like you can do that in Vim, like all, all extensions typically are just somebody had, you know, cobbled together a bunch of procedures that you can call with some keystrokes. Yeah.

[01:02:26] But you don’t need them, right? You can work without them. I’m not that guy. Like, I always need, like, the extra, you know, extensions and plugins and stuff. That’s gotten me in trouble before. But I’ve been very disciplined with my current Vim configuration because I’m really happy with where it’s at. But, like, I’ve been using Vim 20 years? 30 years? Holy God. 30 years? Can it be 30 years? Has Vim been around that long? I don’t know. But I’ve been using it for a while. Yes, it has been. There are things.

[01:03:05] So I say all this to talk about the stupid things. Absolutely dumb thing. To jump around in Vim. There’s always been these plugins to jump around in Vim. There’s always these different ways of doing it. And I have been using this thing called Flash.inVim. and basically what it does well what i thought it did was you hit the letter f and then whatever hit letter you hit after that it would like light up throughout the code that you’re looking at and you could then jump to any of those instances and this sounds minor and it’s it’s kind of is And this is how stupid it is. So I was frustrated because I’m like, I didn’t really use it that much because I… I always wanted to cycle through. So the whole thing with Vim is like you can typically cycle through things. If you’re doing a search for, you know, class and you find the first word of class, you can hit in and it’ll find the next word of class and, you know, like that.

[01:04:14] And so I couldn’t do that with this, with this bounce around feature. Right. So I didn’t really understand the purpose of it. Mind you, I’ve been doing this for years now using this stupid plugin. I’ve been using it wrong the entire fucking time. I wasn’t even close to using it correctly. I wasn’t even using the right binding. I still don’t know why mine worked, but I was using it wrong. And so I finally got frustrated. It’s called Flash Vim. Here, I actually have this video here. Let me share this.

[01:04:50] So I’m sitting there one day. I’m like, God, there’s got to be a way to cycle through what I’m looking for. And so I found this guy. And it’s like, oh, hey, how to use Flash Vim, right? How to jump anywhere instantly in NeoVim. And he’s talking about this plugin. And I watch it, I’m like, Oh my God, I’ve been doing this so wrong. And I feel like so stupid about it. This is so typical of how I use this tool that I get so into a way of doing something that if I try to change it and it just doesn’t work how I think it should work. Because that’s a lot of what Vim is. It’s just like you customizing it so that it works how you think it should work. And uh i’ll put this in the show notes i mean i’m not selling this plug-in to anybody, but when you see how silly simple this plug-in is and how much trouble i was having with it in not understanding why i had it installed it can’t be that simple the the video is 12 minutes long

[01:05:58] for crying out loud well it’s it’s a typical like the first like eight minutes is setting the stupid system up. It’s like, oh my God, you know, I, I can’t stand these videos.

[01:06:11] Yeah it’s it’s it’s not it’s not nearly that much yeah here introduction installation basic jumping around tree set uh uh center mode then we start then we finally start getting into using flash at six minutes what i wasn’t too far off you finally get there in six minutes where you’re yeah and then seven minutes is where i was at trying to try to do things with f and just i’m such an idiot man i am such an idiot i swear to god so all right yeah i’ll check it out this is why you should never listen to me because i i really don’t know what i’m talking about most of the time but i do just enough to to you know be dangerous and oh my gosh man uh it doesn’t matter how much you use it tool i don’t know you can i just felt stupid yeah but it’s not like you had there’s formal training you’re like i found a plugin and if you don’t read docs top to bottom left to right like the whole thing you think you got the gist of it you go and use it.

[01:07:21] And get stuck doing it the way you know and that’s like that’s how i always use vim but in my defense back in the day when i when i learned vim i was working uh on remote systems, i was installing firewalls we cyborg firewalls i got to fly around the country and install these things but they were all over the place and i didn’t have the same configuration everywhere I would jump on, I would edit some files, I was done. Then my next job, we had four racks in our server room, and I would jump to different machines. I’d jump on the mail server if I needed to, and I didn’t spend time putting a bunch of plugins on all the servers because I was using it in different ways, and usually just as a file editor. Get on, configure, send mail with whatever I needed to do. So it’s literally edit the file. I didn’t need anything fancy. Um and that’s just kind of how i use vim and kind of just stuck it that way.

[01:08:25] Until i met you and i started installing plugins and like you said you install too many plugins or you install the wrong plugin and then all of a sudden everything’s broken you’re like oh why what did i install what why is this broken and have to back it out and start over and i’m, If I can move on the file fast and type, I’m good. I was the same way. I didn’t know Vim was a thing. I was using it because I thought that’s how you edited files on Linux machines. I wasn’t aware of Nano or Emacs. I didn’t understand, so I always just used Vim. I mean, it was just how it was.

[01:09:08] And that’s when I was at the Enterprise. and I saw so I say same thing very basic functionality insert, delete, you know just your normal stuff. And then I saw a developer who had MacVim installed so MacVim is like this weird thing like you have Vim in the terminal but for some reason Mac users used to have their own little MacVim application, and he was using it to code and blew my mind. I’m like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you doing here? He’s like, oh, I’m just writing, you know, I think he was writing Ruby at the time, talking about Ruby. He was writing a Rails app, and he’s just like flying around and typing. I’m like, but. Is this on the server he’s like no no no it’s on my desktop like why are you using vim like i think i i used notepad plus back then or something it’s like why are you using dream weaver or something like that he’s like but why use like those things are clunky oh

[01:10:12] eclipse that was the big thing everybody was using clips back then eclipse um and he was like why why use that just i just use vim it’s just as good and i’m actually more productive with it i’m like that’s crazy i would never use them to code and then a couple of like i said that like pretty much that day i started you know using it to code and then a few years later that’s the only thing i was using, uh yeah it was it was such a weird journey like yeah weird man i appreciate the fact that i didn’t know what i was doing with them like i didn’t know it was supposed to be this hard thing to understand because i just embraced the fact that i understood i knew the basic functionality of the motions it’s carried me through so much so i mean it it led to me doing presentations like my first presentation was anything you can do i can do faster in vim yeah and i was using the basic functionality but

[01:11:15] it was really showing people how to get around files quickly and easily.

[01:11:22] I think you inspired me to do that talk for sdphp where i had the vim for php developers talk that i did yeah yeah we’re old it was funny well i mean you’re old you know yeah yeah i’m old too you’re getting you’re getting you’re getting older tomorrow. That i decided sorry yeah that’s fine i don’t care i oh you want to hear something funny oh my gosh uh wait i was gonna wrap up with them uh oh shit i forgot what i was gonna say, i’ve been telling i unironically been telling everybody for the last year i’m 55 years old i’ll be turning 56 yeah that’s totally wrong 56 i’m turning 57 beck is like she’s like looking at me she goes we had this conversation one morning she’s like smiling at me she’s yeah right you’re 55 i’m like i am 55 she’s you’re not 55 eric i’m like what the hell are you talking about i’m 55 and i’m trying to do the math and math is hard as you get older and i just couldn’t do it and

[01:12:32] eventually i had to so it came out a calculator i asked alexa i said alexa, If I was born in 1969, how old would I be now? And, you know, Alexa’s like, well, I don’t know when your birthday is, but depending on when your birthday is, you’re either 56 or 57. I’m like, okay, so I’m turning 50. And in my head, I’m still winning. I’m like, okay, I’m turning 56, obviously. And Beck says something. I don’t know if you have this with your Alexa now. Beck said something. And she goes, no, you’re turning 57. Alexa. Oh, cancel. Cancel.

[01:13:18] Like, this is like a good 30 to 60 seconds later. Steps back in. Oh, that’s right. Your birthday’s May 8th. You’re turning 57. I’m like, shut up. Who passed you? Get out of my conversations. Oh, my God, man. So, yeah. So, I’m way older than I thought I was. Way by a year. yeah 365 days to be exact yeah yeah so yeah i’m turning uh, 57, right? That’s what we decided. That’s what we decided. I missed my 56s. I was never 56, apparently. But you were 55 twice? 55 to 57, yeah. I’m feeling such an idiot.

[01:14:05] So, yeah. As I asked Tom, my wife the other day, we went to the Padres game, which was fun. Went to the Padres game. They’re, like, showing, like, some kid was having a birthday. I forget, he was like 13 or 14. And we’re like, oh, how cute is his birthday? And I look at my wife, I’m like, you realize our Costco membership’s older than he is? Our Costco membership could babysit him. You know that?

[01:14:31] She’s like, shut up. What are you talking… And then like it dawns on her. I’m right. It’s like.

[01:14:40] That’s funny. All right. That’s it. We’re running long. Yep. Go one more show. And then we’re taking a break and doing a conference doing an eight hour long podcast. Yep.

[01:14:57] All right. You got anything else you want to say to the good people before we hang up? Uh tickets still available to tech come join us hang out with eric while he’s when he knows his age you can hang out with me in my last few days in my 40s that’s right oh yeah you’re turning you and you guys just had a wedding anniversary too so yeah i won’t i won’t put you on the spot with that but yeah you’re you are you have a 50th coming up don’t you wait 20 what 26 years okay, I thought my Costco membership was older than your marriage.

[01:15:32] It’s not much younger, but it’s right there.

[01:15:37] My Costco membership can buy alcohol. I’ll give you that much.

[01:15:45] So you turned the five out this year, right?

[01:15:49] Nice. Should be fun. Later this year. All right. All right. I’m happy to be here. Happy to be here with you. Happy to be here with all the people in our Discord. See how I brought it around? It’s like it makes everybody feel good. It’s been good, my God, a little bit. Thanks everybody for hanging out with us. And we’ll see you guys next week. Sounds good. Bye.

[01:16:13] 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	May 7, 2026
Hosted by	Eric Van Johnson, John Congdon
Guest(s)