The PHP Podcast 2026.06.25

🎙️ PHP Podcast – June 25, 2026

Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon

Eric and John are back. Sara and Holly did a better job. Eric’s computer still hates him.

🔌 Eric’s Connectivity Saga: A Possible Resolution
For weeks, Eric has been dealing with a maddening streaming issue — he could see and hear everyone, but nobody could hear or see him. It only happened during Zoom, Slack huddles, and Restream sessions. No one could explain it, including Eric. The apparent fix came by accident: while helping his kid troubleshoot a similar issue, Eric pulled up his own DNS settings and discovered they were only pointing to his router with no upstream fallback. He manually added Google’s 8.8.8.8 and Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 — and for the first time in weeks, had zero issues all week. Does DNS explain streaming dropouts? Almost certainly not. Does it appear to have fixed it? So far, yes. Computers are stupid. Eric needs to retire and open a landscaping business.

✈️ Two Weeks Off: Road Trip, Pittsburgh, and a Graduation
John took the family on a road trip that included national park hikes, biking across the Golden Gate Bridge, and a swing through Universal Studios. Eric headed to Pittsburgh, technically West Virginia, for his niece’s high school graduation. Eric came away impressed with how much Pittsburgh has changed: what was once a gritty steel city has quietly become a genuinely beautiful place. He’s half-serious about looking at it as a future PHP Tek location.

🙏 Sara and Holly: The Better Hosts
Eric and John opened with a heartfelt thank-you to Sara Golemon and Holly Schilling for covering the last two weeks. John’s take: Sara and Holly showed up with documents, had a plan, and ran a tighter show. He’s joking about handing over the keys — mostly.

📰 PHP Architect Takes Over Laravel Magazine
Here’s the announcement Eric was teasing before the break: PHP Architect has taken over the Laravel Magazine brand. It was originally a Statamic, which Eric rebuilt from scratch over the past couple of weeks. No plans to create a print magazine — it will remain a web-only publication. Eric is thinking about opening it to outside contributors, and there’s a real possibility of a dedicated Laravel column eventually appearing in the PHP Architect magazine. The new consulting section Eric built for the site looks sharp enough that John immediately pointed out it looks better than what’s currently on phparch.com.

🔨 Foam Burner Feature: Proof of Concept Wars
John got a big feature in Foam Burner across the finish line — or at least mostly across — recorded a screencast, and sent it off to the people who care. The immediate response: a list of compliance concerns and edge cases. This is a proof of concept. John is sympathetic, having just had to tell Eric the same thing about Laravel Magazine. The cycle of building something you’re proud of and then having someone find the things that aren’t done yet is a universal developer experience.

🤖 Code Review in the Age of AI — What’s the Point?
John is in a strange spot: he’s doing careful code review on pull requests written entirely by Claude, submitted by non-developers. His detailed, educational feedback — the kind meant to help a developer understand why something was done a particular way — is just being fed back into Claude to generate revisions. Nobody’s learning anything. An incident during his vacation reinforced why the reviews matter: someone deployed AI-generated code that wasn’t well reviewed, it broke overnight, and the team had to revert it the next morning. His position: keep reviewing, even if the audience is an AI. But the nature of what you’re reviewing for has to change — you’re no longer nurturing a developer; you’re being a gate. Eric’s broader point: if you’re a developer who cares about the craft, don’t let AI make you lazy. Learn from how it implements things. Ask it why. The thing that will differentiate developers when AI really matures is genuine understanding of what the code is doing — and that only comes from staying curious.

🧬 PHP Generics RFC — Closed
The Generics RFC was shut down while Eric and John were away, and Eric is genuinely disappointed. The proposal was for syntax-only generics: type annotations that static analyzers could read but that would be stripped at the opcode level, meaning no runtime performance impact. The goal was to standardize the generics syntax so PHPStan, Psalm, and other tools all read it the same way — right now they each implement their own dialect. Sara voted no (she explained her reasoning in the June 17 episode). Joe abstained. Whether an active abstain requires a deliberate action or is the default for a non-vote is apparently still a matter of some debate.

📺 PHP Tek 2026 Talks Now on PHP Tech TV
Talks from PHP Tek 2026 are being uploaded to phptech.tv. Subscribers can watch the full library. Several speakers have given permission to make their talks free, and Ben Ramsey’s is one of them. John also added video progress tracking to the platform — it now remembers how far into a video you’ve watched.

🎙️ This Week in PHP Internals (Artisan Build)
While looking for a PHP Internals podcast that Nuno appears to have started (possibly in connection with the PHP Foundation after PHPverse), Eric stumbled on a different show: This Week in PHP Internals, hosted on the Artisan Build site, with four episodes out. Eric doesn’t know who runs it but says it’s good — short, focused, and gets to the point. He’s also still looking for confirmation on what exactly Nuno’s new podcast is and who it’s for. For reference: the original PHP Internals podcast was Derick Rethans’ show, which he hasn’t updated in four or five years. The ecosystem growing new shows is a good sign.

🤝 PHP Friends RFC — Under Discussion
John has been watching the friends RFC, currently in the discussion phase. The idea: a class can explicitly declare another class as a “friend,” granting it access to private properties without requiring inheritance. The canonical use case is a builder pattern — a UserBuilder that needs to set private fields on User without a thousand public setters, and without making those fields non-private. Holly, in chat, noted that the friend model is a special case of a “surfaces” model she proposed a few years back. She also shared that Swift doesn’t have protected at all (just public and private) — something she initially found frustrating but has come to appreciate. Eric admits he’s been guilty of abusing inheritance over the years and is more thoughtful about it now. The RFC is still under discussion; no vote yet.

💻 Eric Drops PHPStorm — Falls Back in Love with Vim
Eric canceled his JetBrains All Products subscription. Not because there’s anything wrong with PHPStorm — he’s explicit about that — but because he’s been doing so much work via Claude Code and making only targeted, smaller changes himself that the license fee no longer made sense. His replacement workflow: VS Code for some things, Vim for others. The Vim part was supposed to be supplemental. Instead, his terminal has taken over: it went from a panel alongside PHPStorm to taking up two-thirds of his screen to now living on its own separate virtual desktop. He’s running Spotify in the terminal. He briefly ran Slack in the terminal. He uses Tmux religiously. “I have problems,” he acknowledged. He would not take this back.

Links from the show:

Host:

Eric Van Johnson

John Congdon

Streams:

- Youtube Channel
- Twitch

📬 Connect & Hire

Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.

Partner

This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners

Displace

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

PHPScore