🎙️ PHP Podcast – September 24, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling

Ian Littman joins the crew to talk PHP community and conferences. Longhorn PHP is three weeks out with a brand new format, the industry keeps shifting under everyone’s feet, and RAM prices remain a personal insult. The hallway track survives it all.

🤠 Longhorn PHP, Three Weeks Out and Doing Things Differently
Ian kicked things off with a rundown of this year’s Longhorn PHP, which lands just three weeks after recording at the Aloft Austin Midtown — the same venue the conference has called home since 2021. Thursday is the workshop and tutorial day, this year built around a full-day session on refactoring and cleaning up code, followed by a free-and-open-to-the-public Merge PHP style meetup that evening.

Friday is the main conference day, opening with a keynote from Elizabeth Barron of the PHP Foundation and closing with Eric Mann. In between there are three tracks and fifteen non-keynote talks, plus open spaces later in the day for the topics that didn’t quite make the cut but still deserve a room full of experts to hash them out.

The biggest change: instead of the previous Thursday/Friday/Saturday layout, Longhorn is running as a weekday event. The main conference day is still available as a virtual ticket for anyone who can’t make it to Austin, streamed both live and after the fact — though the tutorial day stays in-person because three-hour hybrid workshops are notoriously hard to get right.

🎥 Streaming, Latency, and PHPC.tv
The conversation drifted into how the show and conferences actually reach people. Most listeners consume the podcast as audio weeks or months later, but it also goes out to YouTube, Twitch, and PHPC.tv — a PeerTube instance run by Anne Fellina for the community, where you can watch back catalogs of Merge PHP events and other PHP content without handing your data to Google.

Ian explained how Longhorn and PHP Tech run their streams through MUX rather than YouTube or Twitch, because MUX lets them toggle low-latency streaming. With the venue fully hardwired at gigabit, they can drop latency from thirty seconds down to five or ten, getting remote attendees closer to real time. Joe reminisced about broadcast TV and AM radio football feeds being perfectly in sync back in the day — something modern streaming has, ironically, made worse.

Sara recalled Sean Coates hauling a satellite dish onto a hotel roof back in 2008 just to get a workable stream out of a venue with dial-up-grade internet. The good news is that serving a gigabit of packets no longer requires heroics, and venue connectivity has steadily improved year over year.

📉 A Shifting Industry and the Job Market
The crew dug into the state of tech hiring, riffing on an article claiming nearly 29% of open tech positions had been listed for more than 90 days — the so-called “ghost jobs.” They weighed both sides: some listings really are phantom postings, while others reflect companies that post one description to fish for hundreds of thousands of applicants.

Joe noted that straight-up “PHP developer” roles have largely vanished, replaced by “back-end,” “full stack,” “cloud,” and “forward deployed engineer” titles. Ian pointed out that on smaller teams, full stack is effectively mandatory now, and the real value a developer brings is increasingly about communication — pushing back on vague requirements that even a stack of servers couldn’t guess at.

This naturally spilled into a shared loathing of GraphQL, an aside about SOAP and XPath, and a genuinely grim note on RAM prices. With Samsung doubling a portion of production and rumors of Intel getting back into memory (and maybe even reviving Optane), there was cautious, sarcastic hope that prices might eventually come back down to earth.

💸 The Business of Running a Conference
Ian got candid about the economics of Longhorn. He walked through the conference’s lineage — replacing Lone Star PHP after its seven-year run, launching in 2018 alongside a wave of regional PHP conferences, weathering COVID by rolling deposits forward with a cooperative venue, and navigating scheduling collisions with Laracon and a local application security conference.

The hard numbers were sobering. Attendance dropped roughly 30% going into 2025, landing around 110 in-person attendees in a room built for 150 to 250 — enough to feel empty. The reliable last-minute booking surge that used to push the event from red to black largely failed to materialize, leaving the buffer demolished. Ian is happy to subsidize sponsorship gaps from his own pocket when the room is full, but a downturn in actual attendees is a different signal entirely.

That’s why this year scales back to two days: running a two-day event pencils out to about two-thirds the cost of three, Saturday flights are cheaper for a continental US crowd, and the better-attended days make for fuller rooms — which are simply more fun to speak to. Ticket and sponsorship prices even came down slightly rather than climbing with inflation.

🤝 Why the Human Component Still Matters
Ian closed on the thing conferences do that nothing else can: getting people in a room to cut through the noise and share how to build things better. As software output per person grows by leaps and bounds, the value of humans who know what questions to ask — and who can turn a mistake into a shared cautionary tale — has never been higher. Open spaces, borrowed shamelessly from DevOps Days, are his admission that the best conversations won’t always happen from the podium.

Sara made the emotional case plainly: her greatest fear is that in three years we lose the human component of problem solving and sharing our love of it. The hallway track, she insisted, is where it’s always at — you can’t replicate that over Zoom or a YouTube “like and subscribe,” and you certainly can’t get the photo of you stabbing your friend in a Viking helmet five years later.

To lean into that, the schedule intentionally keeps AI to a single tutorial and single talk — everything else is chosen for shelf life, including a PHP 8.6 talk from a release manager (the release lands about a month after the conference) and Elizabeth’s PHP Foundation session. The rest, Ian figures, will show up organically in the hallway track anyway.

Links from the show:

• Longhorn PHP — Grab an in-person or virtual ticket
• Longhorn PHP Looking back, and looking forward
• PHP Tech CFP — Open until the end of October
• PHP Architect Swag Store — Yes, they have socks
• Join the PHP Architect Discord

Host:

Joe Ferguson

• Mastodon: @joepferguson@phpc.social
• PHPArch.me: @svpernova09

Sara Golemon

• Mastodon: @pollita@phpc.social

Holly Schilling

• Mastodon: @TheCodeLorax@tech.lgbt

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.

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