The PHP Podcast 2026.07.02

🎙️ PHP Podcast – July 2, 2026

Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon

Eric’s new laptop won’t share its screen. John lost a fight with a leaf blower. PHP 8.6 alpha dropped. 100+ people showed up to make PHP seem cool again. Normal show.

🖥️ Eric’s Fresh Install and the Screen That Wouldn’t Share
Eric has been wrestling with connectivity drops for weeks, and this week he took drastic action: a fresh install on an older MacBook Pro with almost nothing on it. He installed exactly three apps — 1Password, Ghosty, and Tailscale — and is running Discord and Slack through Safari to minimize variables. The irony is immediate: the new setup can’t share its screen during the show, something that was a central part of what they planned to cover. He hits every macOS security dialog in real time, can never quite get there, and eventually gives up and goes verbal. The fresh-install theory is that one of his previously installed apps was causing his streaming dropouts. Whether it worked is TBD, but at least he stayed connected.

📰 PHP Architect July Issue — Published Live
John published this month’s magazine live on the show — walked through the admin steps in real time, which Eric found appropriately chaotic. The monster feature article this month is “Building Secure REST APIs for Healthcare Applications with PHP and Laravel,” running 21–22 pages, making it likely the longest single feature they’ve ever run without splitting it across issues. The page count is mostly because of the volume of code samples. It will not be the free article of the month, which Eric admitted immediately creates extra work for John. Eric also noticed for the first time that Edward Bernard has an ad running in the magazine (Wizard’s Lens, his book) — which has apparently been there for a while.

🏒 John’s Week: Leaf Blower, Racquetball, and AI Pull Requests
John started the week by getting hit in the eyebrow with a leaf blower. The full story: his wife wanted the leaves blown off the top of the pergola, he figured out he could push the leaf blower up there and let gravity return it to his hand like a boomerang, it worked three times, and on the fourth attempt it went straight to the eyebrow. He’s on enough medications that he bruises instantly. He then played racquetball, found himself in an extended session with an 80-year-old and a much better 35-year-old, took a hard ball to the back of the leg, and is expecting to regret it tomorrow. On the development side: he’s still reviewing pull requests where roughly 80% of the code is written by Claude and submitted by non-developers. He talked to one of the authors about it, and the author’s response was that he does learn from John’s feedback — he reads it, tells Claude about it, and asks Claude not to do it again. John is… accepting of this.

🏗️ Laravel Verbs, Eloquent Hooks, and a Client Project That May Be Back
A previous client project — originally built in Laravel 7, heavily involving event sourcing — may be reviving. Eric spent the last few weeks using Claude to walk the application from Laravel 7 to Laravel 13, then tackle the event sourcing library migration. The original library is no longer maintained, so Eric and Claude moved everything to Laravel Verbs. Eric has a nuanced view of Verbs: it’s great for developers new to event sourcing because it’s approachable, but gets a little murky when you start talking about projections in Laravel terms versus event sourcing terms. To police CRUD operations and ensure nothing bypasses Verbs, Claude suggested hooking into Eloquent’s lifecycle callbacks — so whenever any CRUD action is called on a model, it first fires through Verbs. Eric loved this; John had reservations, arguing it inverts the paradigm (the change causes the event rather than the event causing the change). Eric’s counterpoint: the Eloquent hook fires before the model touches the database, so Verbs still logs first, and it solves the very real problem of a developer seeing a venues table and just using the model directly. Holly, watching in the Discord chat, noted that Verbs calls the aggregate root a “state” rather than using the standard event sourcing term “root” — which is exactly the kind of terminology drift Eric finds frustrating about Verbs, even as he thinks it’s the right tool for this project. The client meeting itself went well; their CFO grasped event sourcing immediately because it maps perfectly to accounting ledgers, where every entry is permanent and any correction requires its own entry and explanation.

🚀 Laracon and NativePHP Mobile
Laracon is July 28–29, and Eric is going. NativePHP Mobile is holding a one-day mini-conference immediately after on July 30 — “Vibes with Native PHP” — for an additional $129. Eric is likely not staying for it due to flight constraints, but he used it as an excuse to hype NativePHP mobile again. He’s been talking about this project for a while and still hasn’t shipped a real app with it himself, which frustrates him. His pitch: if you’re a PHP developer who has ever wanted to do mobile development and found the barrier too steep, this is the moment. NativePHP is pushing more native functionality on both iOS and Android, the license fees are gone, and the project is in its second wave. There is also an ongoing campaign — which Eric is actively encouraging in this episode — to pressure Holly Schilling into building the PHP Tek conference app using NativePHP Mobile.

📐 Surfaces RFC & Friends RFC
Holly’s Surfaces RFC came up briefly — Eric wanted to discuss it more but they ran out of time, mostly because Holly was busy in the Discord getting called out for doing a conference app for Longhorn PHP. The short version: the Friends RFC (in discussion) allows a class to explicitly grant another class access to its private properties without requiring inheritance — the canonical use case is a builder that needs to set private fields on an object without requiring setters, which would make those fields effectively public. Holly’s Surfaces RFC extends the idea to roles rather than just specific classes. Eric and John agree they need to have Holly on as a guest to actually discuss it properly — a plan they’ve now made twice.

🐛 Chris Miller Submits a PR to PHP Core
Their team member Chris Miller found a bug in the PHP JIT compiler: code that goes through the JIT was returning a different result than the same code without the JIT, specifically with the bitwise NOT operator. He opened an issue, looked at the C code, figured out the cause, and submitted a pull request to fix it. The same fix already existed for the bitwise OR and XOR operators — this PR adds the bitwise NOT. Eric loves this kind of story: a developer using PHP, noticing something odd, going all the way to the C source to understand why, and contributing a fix rather than just filing a bug. There’s a known separate JIT issue in PHP 8.5 tracing mode affecting background workers (not the main application); Eric upgraded his client’s app to 8.5 and ran into it, and believes it’s addressed in 8.5.7.

🎉 PHP 8.6.0 Alpha 1 — Released Today
Joe Ferguson — their friend, PHP community member, and occasional target of friendly on-air ribbing — released PHP 8.6.0 Alpha 1 today. Joe is one of the release managers for PHP 8.6, with Daniel Scherzer serving as the senior release manager (the PHP Foundation recently updated the title from “mentor”). Eric and John congratulated Joe warmly, mostly by pointing out that Chris Miller is smarter than Joe. Joe was apparently on the PHP Foundation Ambassador call as well.

🏨 PHP Tek 2027: Hotel + Conference Bundle
PHP Tek 2027 is doing something new this year: an optional bundle where you can buy your conference ticket and hotel stay together. Two options — three nights (Mon–Wed) or four nights (Mon–Thu). The pitch: one all-in number is easier to take to a manager or a CFO than itemizing conference pass, lunches, breakfasts, and lodging separately. Eric and John are explicit that they make less money doing it this way; the benefit is that your room is booked immediately when you pay, so you won’t forget and find rooms sold out later. Breakfast in the room is free for the first person, half price for a second person in the same room. Dinners and travel are still on you.

📋 CFPs: Find-a-Conference and Longhorn PHP
Someone in the community pointed Eric to a website aggregating call-for-papers listings across conferences — not PHP-specific, and not geographically locked to the US. Useful if you’re a speaker (or want to be one) and want to see where to submit. Eric mentioned it as a resource for PHP community members to speak at non-PHP conferences, which the community generally doesn’t do enough. Specifically: Longhorn PHP’s CFP is open until July 10 at cfp.longhornphp.com. That’s one week from now as of this recording.

🏛️ PHP Foundation Ambassador Program
Eric joined the PHP Foundation’s new Ambassador Program and attended its first meeting. He expected a modest turnout — the meeting had 114 people in the call. Three of them were from PHP Architect. Elizabeth Barron organized it and was apparently worried nobody would show up; Eric was not worried. The program’s focus is getting the word out about PHP to new developers and making the language feel more approachable — something the community has been trying to do for years without a coordinating structure. There was one slide. They talked about the slide for the whole meeting. There are multiple programs under the Foundation you can sign up for (including security-focused groups); you sign up via a Google Form, you don’t have to speak in the meetings, and it’s open to anyone regardless of PHP skill level. Eric’s one note to Elizabeth: please don’t make the coordination mechanism a mailing list.

🤖 AI Note Takers — The Open Meeting Debate
Eric’s AI note taker was running in the Foundation meeting, and some attendees objected. Eric is a defender of AI note takers: he gets summaries, can reference meetings later, and gets a Monday morning digest of the previous week. His position is that banning agents from an open, public meeting doesn’t prevent recording — it just means the notes disappear into the ether. For genuinely sensitive work — he describes a government-adjacent client where developers need background checks and fingerprints — he’s fully supportive of restrictions and will pull his agent without complaint. For an open PHP Foundation meeting, he finds the concern disproportionate, and says if agents are banned outright, he’d stop participating because he doesn’t have the bandwidth to rely on someone else’s notes. He also acknowledged that the irony was not lost on him: the same AI capability that makes voice recording feel threatening also makes it trivially easy to deepfake a voice regardless of whether an agent was in the room.

📢 Ethical Ads
Tessa mentioned a developer-focused advertising platform called Ethical Ads on a recent Live and Kicking episode. Eric found it interesting enough to flag on the show — it’s an ad network specifically for developer-focused content that emphasizes privacy and non-tracking approaches. Eric and John are always trying to figure out better ways to promote PHP Architect, the magazine, and PHP Tek; this may be worth exploring as an alternative to standard ad networks that don’t align well with developer sensibilities.

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/

OurCVEs