php[podcast] episodes from php[architect]

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.

Links from the show:

externals.io — PHP Internals Discussion Reader

PHP RFC Watch — Track Active PHP RFCs

Ben Ramsey: PHP License Simplified

Laravel Shift — Automated Laravel Upgrade Tool

Laravel Cloud

How to Jump Anywhere Instantly in NeoVim (Flash.nvim Tutorial)

PHP Tek 2026 — Chicago

PHP Architect Store

PHP Architect Discord

Host:

Eric Van Johnson

X: @shocm

Mastodon: @[email protected]

Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social

PHPArch.me: @eric

John Congdon

X: @johncongdon

Mastodon: @[email protected]

Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social

PHPArch.me: @john

Streams:

Youtube Channel

Twitch

Connect & Hire

PHP Architect Website

Twitter/X

Mastodon

Hire PHP Developers

Looking to hire PHP developers? Email [email protected] – 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

Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore



CodeRabbit



Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.



Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Join Us Live Next Week

Youtube Channel

Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com

The post The PHP Podcast 2026.05.07 appeared first on PHP Architect.

PHP Podcast – April 30, 2026

Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John Congdon

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

The Drone Slayer Strikes

Eric and John wrapped up a Padres game at beautiful Petco Park in downtown San Diego — and things got weird on the way out. A rogue drone started buzzing around a busy intersection, lingering on a guy on a scooter, before making a fateful attempt to fly in front of Eric’s car. It did not make it. The controller came running out, Eric kept driving, and John has already dubbed him “the drone slayer.” Eric still hasn’t looked at whether his wife’s car got scratched, which feels like the bravest choice of all.

Baseball Week Never Ends

The reason today’s episode started an hour early? Baseball. John’s week was wall-to-wall: a Tuesday night little league game, the Padres game with Eric on Wednesday, practice Thursday night, the playoff draft reveal Friday, a little league game Saturday, and another Padres game Sunday. Eric pointed out John was wearing his own last name on a jersey to a Padres game, which opened up a whole sidebar on why anyone buys a $200 jersey with a player’s name on it when players change teams every two years anyway.

Walking Pneumonia and the Power of the Right Antibiotic

John’s week was also scrambled because his son had been diagnosed with regular pneumonia — but after not getting better, a second doctor visit revealed it was actually atypical (walking) pneumonia, which requires a completely different antibiotic. Once on the correct medication, his son bounced back almost immediately. The kid had been pushing himself trying to feel well enough for sixth grade camp, but there’s really no faking it with the wrong treatment.

The Archie Situation — AI Standups Gone Sideways

Eric has had a rough stretch after Anthropic shut down OpenClaw, the platform that powered their internal Discord bot Archie (a.k.a. Alfred). Archie had been running daily team standups, generating weekly summaries, letting team members tag it with updates throughout the day, and even setting reminders. Everyone got spoiled by it. Since then, attempts to migrate to Ollama — both locally and through the web service — have been plagued by slow response times and dropped messages. Eric is close to pulling the plug and going back to the old manual method, and he’s not happy about it.

Claude SSH’d Into Eric’s Server and Fixed Everything

For weeks, Eric had been fighting a broken Postiz Docker container — a self-hosted social media scheduling tool he uses to post across platforms. After updates broke it and multiple attempts at a fresh install still left it broken, he dropped the problem in Claude’s lap and explained the whole situation. Claude asked for permission to SSH into the remote server on Eric’s Tailscale network, and Eric said sure. Thirty minutes later, Claude had identified the culprit — a Temporal workflow engine losing its configuration on restart — wrote a fix script, configured the service to reconfigure properly on boot, and even set up a cron job to restart the container on reboot. Eric’s still trying to find that chat to review exactly what it did, but the service is running.

GitHub is Getting Hammered by AI Agents

GitHub has had a rough patch of outages, and the numbers tell the story: 20 million new repos per month, 1.4 billion commits, 90 million pull requests — with a dramatic spike right at the start of 2026. Part of the culprit? AI agents being unleashed on codebases to automatically open pull requests from backlog tickets. Eric has a client doing exactly this, and while it sounds impressive from the owner’s perspective (“look at all this work getting done!”), the developers on the ground report that a high percentage of those AI-generated PRs require significant human correction before they’re anywhere close to mergeable. The comparison to Reddit’s early explosion — and the one engineer who basically didn’t sleep for two years — felt pretty apt.

The GitHub Security Vulnerability Nobody Talked About

As if the outages weren’t enough, GitHub quietly disclosed a serious security vulnerability: a specially crafted git push — using malformed options in the push metadata — could allow arbitrary code execution on GitHub’s own servers. Eric had to dig to find the blog post because GitHub was not exactly shouting about it. To their credit, they state that their investigation found no evidence the vulnerability was ever exploited in the wild. But knowing that a specific sequence of bytes in a git push could have handed someone the keys to GitHub’s servers is genuinely unsettling.

The Creator of Ghosty Is Leaving GitHub

Mitchell Hashimoto — creator of the Ghostty terminal and formerly of HashiCorp — announced he’s leaving GitHub, where he’s been a user since 2008 (user #1299). This comes shortly after the Zig programming language made the same move, also citing reliability concerns. Eric was mildly skeptical of the “announcing I’m leaving” genre of posts, pointing out that GitHub doesn’t especially need your permission to stop using it. Notably, Hashimoto’s post doesn’t say what he plans to use instead. John joined GitHub in 2009, which led to a fun live expedition through his commit history — turns out he got serious about coding right around July 2013, roughly when DiegoDev landed its first client.

Update Composer. Like, Right Now.

PHP developers tend to set Composer up and forget about it — but there’s been a serious security vulnerability patched in a recent release that you absolutely want. The fix is simple: just run composer self-update. It updates in place and keeps a rollback copy in case anything breaks. While you’re at it, if you have global Composer packages installed, run composer global update to catch those too. Eric noted that Composer should really warn you when you’re significantly behind versions, the way Claude Code does. Until it does, just make a habit of it.

Linux Kernel Exploit — Patch Your Servers

A CVE was shared in the phparch Discord that affects Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, and Red Hat: a Linux kernel exploit that lets an attacker gain root access with a remarkably small payload — around 732 bytes targeting setuid. It’s a good reminder that the old sysadmin badge of honor (“my server has 5-year uptime, never rebooted”) is the wrong mentality now. With tools like Terraform and infrastructure-as-code, spinning up a freshly patched machine is the move. Keep your operating systems current, especially Linux servers running in production.

Holly Built a PHP Tek App — And It’s Already Good

Community member Holly built a native attendee app for PHP Tek, available now in beta on iOS (via TestFlight) and Android. You can browse the schedule, select the talks you want to attend, and it’ll warn you if two of your picks are in conflict — a “merge conflict,” as Eric put it. Best of all, it sends push notifications when sessions you’ve favorited get moved or rescheduled, which happens constantly at tech conferences. Eric’s wife installed it without being told anything about it and figured it out on her own — about as good a usability test as you can get. The app is built natively in Swift and Kotlin. Be kind to Holly — this is a gift to the community.

PHP Tek in 19 Days + New PHP Architect Merch

PHP Tek is nearly here — 19 days out in Chicago. A brand new PHP Architect elephant is coming (tentatively named Holly, after a live-stream vote). Eric also walked through new merch at store.phparch.com: a v-neck version of the classic rainbow PHP Architect shirt, and his personal labor of love — the “I have standards, specifically PSR 0, 1” tee — which he admits has sold exactly zero copies. If the hotel room block is sold out by the time you read this, reach out to the team directly and they’ll see what they can do.

Links from the show:

Postiz — Open Source Social Media Scheduling

GitHub Security Advisory: Remote Code Execution via Git Push Options

PHP Tek 2026 — Chicago

PHP Architect Store

PHP Architect Discord

An update on GitHub availability

Migrating from GitHub to Codeberg

Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub

Securing the git push pipeline: Responding to a critical remote code execution vulnerability

Composer 2.9.6 fixes Perforce Driver Command Injection Vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-40261, CVE-2026-40176)

Copy Fail: 732 Bytes to Root on Every Major Linux Distribution.

Host:

Eric Van Johnson

X: @shocm

Mastodon: @[email protected]

Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social

PHPArch.me: @eric

John Congdon

X: @johncongdon

Mastodon: @[email protected]

Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social

PHPArch.me: @john

Streams:

Youtube Channel

Twitch

Connect & Hire

PHP Architect Website

Twitter/X

Mastodon

Hire PHP Developers

Looking to hire PHP developers? Email [email protected] – 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

Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore



CodeRabbit



Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.



Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Join Us Live Next Week

Youtube Channel

Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com

The post The PHP Podcast 2026.04.30 appeared first on PHP Architect.

Elizabeth Barron returns to the show just four weeks after her debut appearance for a wide-ranging follow-up on her first months as Executive Director of the PHP Foundation. Elizabeth shares the key findings from her community listening tour, covers the upcoming PHP community survey in partnership with JetBrains, talks about the Foundation’s plans for transparency, documentation, and guest blogging, and discusses the challenges of the PHP newcomer experience. The episode also features a candid conversation about public speaking anxiety, conference culture, and the enduring warmth of the PHP community.

Topics Covered

PHP Foundation Community Findings Main Topic

Elizabeth published a blog post summarising the findings from her listening tour across the PHP community. Four key themes emerged:

Foundation transparency — Many people don’t know what the Foundation is doing; the website is too generic and needs to better reflect the team’s actual work.

Marketing of PHP — How PHP is perceived externally, and how the community can better promote the language.

Community support — What the Foundation can do to better support developers, user groups, and sub-communities.

The language itself — Feedback and ideas relating to PHP’s ongoing development.

Elizabeth noted that the volume of feedback was a good sign — silence would be a much bigger problem. A Part Two of the blog post is in the works and will cover strategy and next steps.

Newcomer Experience & Documentation Gap

A recurring theme from the community feedback was how hard it is for brand-new developers to get started with PHP:

There is no single central “landing page” for newcomers — help is scattered across Discord, Reddit, local user groups, and elsewhere.

The PHP manual assumes a baseline of programming knowledge that true beginners don’t yet have.

Many existing beginner resources have not been updated as the language has evolved.

PHP lacks the kind of gamified, beginner-friendly learning apps that Python and JavaScript enjoy.

Mike noted that most coding bootcamps are JavaScript-first, leaving a gap for PHP-based introductory learning.

Elizabeth is exploring whether the Foundation can help coordinate and amplify existing resources rather than compete with them — and fill in the gaps that remain.

Matt Stafer’s recent involvement with the Foundation was highlighted as a potential access point for reaching newcomers, given his large following.

PHP Community Survey (with JetBrains)

The PHP Foundation is running a community survey in partnership with JetBrains (makers of PHPStorm).

The goal is to generate open, usable data that anyone — including the Foundation, JetBrains, and the broader community — can analyse.

Community members were invited to suggest their own questions (the submission window closed on the day of recording).

The full survey was expected to launch in early June.

Foundation Transparency & Hiring Update

The Foundation’s developer hiring process (which had been open in a previous cycle) was paused while Elizabeth settled into the role and internal processes were stabilised.

Many of the Foundation’s developers currently work in silos; improving collaboration and communication across the team is a near-term priority.

The Foundation’s blog will be opened up to guest bloggers — Elizabeth teased an upcoming post she’s excited about but couldn’t yet name.

Developer applications are expected to reopen in autumn 2025.

Public Speaking Anxiety & Conference Culture

An unexpectedly personal and engaging segment where all three speakers opened up about their experiences with social anxiety and public speaking:

Mike shared that despite running the show and talking to guests regularly, he struggled to approach familiar faces at PHP conferences in person.

The group discussed strategies: preparing thoroughly (Elizabeth and Shane), improvising with bullet points (Chris), and the benefit of pairing up to speak (Mike and Chris’s planed joint talk).

Elizabeth reminded Mike that audiences are always rooting for the speaker — and encouraged him to keep pushing through the discomfort.

Chris mentioned Merge PHP (online conference, 14th May) as a useful middle step between podcasting and live in-person talks.

PHP Appalachia — A Community Origin Story

Elizabeth shared the story of PHP Appalachia, one of the earliest informal PHP community gatherings, held in the Gatlinburg, Tennessee area starting around 2006. Around 12 people from the PHP IRC channel (phpC) rented a cabin with Wi-Fi, gave talks, and sat around a campfire — and Elizabeth is still friends with every single person who attended.

Links & Resources

PHP Foundation

The Executive Director’s Manifesto — Chris’s article on PHP Architect, based on Elizabeth’s previous episode (free to read)

Merge PHP — Online PHP conference, 14th May (Andy Snell: “More than just a cache, data-structured databases”)

PHP Tech Conference — Coming up in a few weeks, running alongside JS Tech for the first time

PHP Architect Magazine — Use code ALIVE3 for the first 3 months of a digital annual subscription free

PHP Architect Store — T-shirts, caps, mugs and more

PHP Architect Discord — Join the community, ask questions, and chat with PHP core contributors

PHP Architect Social Media

X: https://x.com/phparch

Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com

PHPArch.me: https://phparch.me/@phparch

Discord: https://discord.phparch.com

Partner

This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partner.

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 — without the steep learning curve of Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform. Perfect for solo developers and small teams who want enterprise-grade infrastructure without the enterprise-grade complexity.

https://displace.tech/

Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

The post PHP Alive And Kicking: Episode 29 Elizabeth Barron appeared first on PHP Architect.

In this episode, Scott talks Storyblok with Daniel Mendoza and his talk on using AI to help developers learn new technology that he will be presenting at JStek 2026.

Links:

Our Discord – https://discord.gg/aMTxunVx

Buy our shirts – https://store.phparch.com/products/community-corner-podcast-t-shirt

Daniel’s Links:

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-mendoza-503396152/

Personal Site – https://danieljmendoza.com/

Scott’s Links:

Website – https://scott.keck-warren.com/

Bluesky – https://bsky.app/profile/scottkeckwarren.bsky.social

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-keck-warren-91689810/

Mastodon – https://phpc.social/@scottkeckwarren

PHP Architect Social Media:

X: https://x.com/phparch

Mastodon: https://phparch.social/@phparch

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/phparch.com

Discord: https://discord.phparch.com

Subscribe to our magazine: https://www.phparch.com/subscribe/

Partners

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

Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore

https://phpscore.com/

CodeRabit

CodeRabbit – Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.

https://www.coderabbit.ai/

Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/

#phpc #php #communityCornerPodcast #podcast #phptek #jstek

The post Community Corner: Storyblok with Daniel Mendoza appeared first on PHP Architect.

PHP Podcast – April 23, 2026

Hosts: Eric Van Johnson & John

Duration: ~1 hour 10 minutes

Episode Summary

Eric and John return to the podcast after a few weeks away, discussing everything from Disneyland trips and bowling tournaments to EAV database nightmares, editor wars (Vim vs. PHPStorm), AI coding tools, and the state of in-person PHP community events.

Thank You to Our Sponsor

Displace Technologies – Building PHP applications is your passion. Managing cloud infrastructure shouldn’t be your headache.

Displace is your partner in cloud infrastructure orchestration, giving solo developers and small teams the tools and automation to deploy enterprise-grade Kubernetes clusters without the enterprise-grade complexity or cost.

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Show Notes & Timestamps

[00:00] Welcome Back – Eric and John return after Joe, Sarah, and Sammy filled in last week

[02:45] Technical Difficulties – Eric’s streaming setup continues to cause problems

[04:30] PHP Architect Consulting – Reminder that PHP Architect does real-world consulting work (augment teams or full team)

[06:15] PHP Tek Countdown – 26 days away! Less than 4 weeks

[08:30] John’s Disneyland Trip – Family spring break trip with a clever 3-day pass hack

[12:00] Bowling Tournament – John competed in Reno for U.S. Championship (singles: 1,963rd, doubles: 2,599th, team: 607th)

[14:00] Joe Ferguson News – Congratulations to Joe on becoming PHP Release Manager!

[16:30] EAV Database Nightmare – John’s journey removing Entity-Attribute-Value system after 10+ years (running out of bigint IDs)

[28:00] Editor Wars: Vim vs. PHPStorm – Eric’s return to NeoVim after trying VS Code. Discussion of keybindings, speed, and muscle memory

[38:00] AI Coding Tools – Using Claude Code with subagents (front-end, back-end, database, QA). Discussion of productivity gains and QA bottlenecks

[46:00] Docker Sandbox for Claude – John explains running Claude in Docker sandbox mode for project isolation

[52:00] PHP Tek Mobile App – Holly (listener/mobile dev) offered to build an attendee app with wallet pass integration

[56:30] Trailer Disaster Averted – Holly got trailer tires changed just before record flooding at the storage location

[01:01:00] PHP Verse 2026 – JetBrains virtual event. Discussion of value of in-person vs. virtual conferences

[01:08:00] Bitwarden CLI Security Alert – Trojan horse in version 2026.4.0 (credential stealer). Verify your installation!

[01:13:00] Security & AI – Discussion of supply chain attacks, npm pre-install hooks, and risks of AI-generated code without review

Links Mentioned

Displace Technologies – Episode sponsor

PHP Podcast Discord

PHP Architect on YouTube

PHP Architect – Consulting & Magazine

PHP Tek 2026 – 26 days away!

PHP Verse 2026 – JetBrains virtual event

SessionEye – Conference schedule management

Quotes

“I’m still coding but I’m not doing like a full end-to-end coding anymore… I don’t know if I need PHPStorm anymore.”

– Eric on how AI tools have changed his workflow

“It’s like you go away on vacation and you have a great time… but you come home and you lay down in your bed and you’re like, ‘Oh wait, this feels better.'”

– Eric describing his return to Vim

“I’m embracing these early adopters of ‘we don’t need developers anymore, we have AI’ because I’m charging them a lot of money here in a couple of years.”

– Eric on fixing AI-generated code

Host:

Eric Van Johnson

X: @shocm

Mastodon: @[email protected]

Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social

PHPArch.me: @eric

John Congdon

X: @johncongdon

Mastodon: @[email protected]

Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social

PHPArch.me: @john

Streams:

Youtube Channel

Twitch

Connect & Hire

PHP Architect Website

Twitter/X

Mastodon

Hire PHP Developers

Looking to hire PHP developers? Email [email protected] – 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

Put Your Technical Debt on Autopay with PHPScore



CodeRabbit



Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit.



Music Provided by Epidemic Sound

https://www.epidemicsound.com/

Next Episode

Join us next week for more PHP news, tech talk, and community updates. See you at PHP Tek!

Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com 

The post The PHP Podcast 2026.04.23 appeared first on PHP Architect.