Laracon US came back for its 2026 edition on July 28 and 29, at the SoWa Power Station in Boston’s arts district. Two days, one stage, and a lineup of eighteen speakers that ranged from Taylor Otwell himself down to independent educators, package authors, and engineers visiting from outside the Laravel world entirely. If you […]

Deploying new features used to mean holding your breath. You merged the branch, pushed to production, and hoped the QA process caught everything. If it didn’t, rollback meant either reverting a deployment or shipping a hotfix under pressure. Feature flags change that story entirely, and Laravel Pennant gives you a first-party, well-designed way to build […]

Recursive CTEs in MySQL let you query trees, org charts, and nested categories in a single query. Here’s how to use them effectively with PHP. Every PHP developer eventually hits the “tree problem.” You have categories with subcategories, employees with managers, comments with replies, or menu items with children — and you need to query […]

Terminal UIs have had a quiet renaissance in the developer tools world. From Lazygit to btop, the era of the ugly text-only CLI is giving way to rich, interactive interfaces built entirely in the terminal. PHP developers have historically been left out of this movement — our CLI tooling was functional but rarely beautiful. That […]

 In this special live episode of The PHP Podcast, hosts Eric Van Johnson and John Congdon welcome the legendary Nuno Maduro from the Laravel Core Team — live and in person! This episode is packed with energy, laughs, and deep insights as Nuno shares stories from behind the scenes of Laravel development, the philosophy […]

 From wannabe teen hacker to 20+ years in PHP, AI Lead at Laravel, and producing Laravel Boost – come and hear about Ashley Hindle and his journey. Laravel Boost Deep Dive Makes AI code better with context-aware docs, guidelines, and tools Auto-detects your packages/versions (Laravel, Pest, Filament, Tailwind, etc.) Born from Ashley’s earlier project […]

   This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John talk about Scott’s PHP 8.5 review, Alive and Kicking’s first live stream, PHP Foundation’s call for design, the new Laravel Forge, and more… Links from the show: What’s New in PHP 8.5? (Release Date + Must-Know Features) | PHP Architect PHP Alive and Kicking […]

 This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John discuss NativePHP bringing everything, including the Kitchen Sink, PHP Foundation announcement of the SDK for MCP, Nuno’s Explanation of Laravel MCP, PHP 8.5 Pipe Operator, the Supply Chain issue with NPM, and more. Links from the show: GitHub – NativePHP/kitchen-sink-mobile: NativePHP for mobile demo app […]

 It all started with a simple annoyance. I was working on a Laravel project and kept having to run the same set of commands in a tinker session to setup a test subscriber in a specific state. Every time I would need to copy and paste a bunch of commands into tinker to get […]

Introduction While certainly not a new concept, Queues have become a powerful and handy feature of modern frameworks. They enable our normally thread-locked apps to asynchronously dispatch tasks, allowing workflows and, especially, users to continue forward. Expectations are high for websites to deliver fast and get content on the page to maintain a good user […]