Hi everyone,
It's Thursday once again and that means we have a new edition of PHPWeekly. In this week's newsletter we have articles about Symfony's 20th year, when CRUD tables are no longer enough, Property hooks and why Brent Rose is excited about PHP in 2026. We have tutorials on Laravel Artisan Commands, Mastering the art of API design with Laravel, and a senior guide on Production-Ready ElasticSearch with Symfony 7.4. Finally in our Reading section we have a video from Nuno Maduro speaking on the recent tech AI layoffs, we also have article on A Weekend Debugging Session That Turned Into a Cybercrime Investigation, and The Ultimate Image Solution for Symfony.
We have all that and more, so we do hope you enjoy this week's newsletter. If you have an article, tutorial or podcast that you would like to be featured in our newsletter, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].
All the best,
Adrian
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Articles
PHP in 2026
It's 2026, and I'm excited about PHP! Why? Let me tell you.
When CRUD Tables Are No Longer Enough
Anyone who has built an admin panel in PHP knows how this story usually ends. At the beginning, everything is simple: a table, a form, a couple of filters. Then real requirements arrive — relationships between data, more complex flows, partial updates — and the classic “table + form” CRUD starts to crack.
What Building a Simple E-commerce Cart Taught Me About Senior Laravel Engineering
I built a production-grade e-commerce cart in 14 hours to explore Laravel Volt. This article focuses on the engineering decisions that matter: concurrency handling, partial failure recovery, data snapshotting, and query optimization.
Symfony 20 year!
This year, Symfony celebrates its 20 year anniversary. Let’s dive into some statistics of years of making web development history.
Stop Flaky Tests: Freeze Time in Laravel Testing
About a year ago, I wrote about freezing time when testing Laravel's temporary storage URLs.
PHP Snippets: Property Hooks
PHP 8.4 just made our lives easier. Remember all those getter and setter methods we wrote? There's a better way now!
Pointers & References: A Deep Dive for PHP Developers
Since you're coming from PHP, I'll explain pointers and references in C/C++ by comparing them to concepts you already know, then diving into the details.
PHP 8.4 Features I can’t live without anymore
PHP 8.4 was released on November 21, 2024. Today is… well, let’s just say it’s been a while.
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Tutorials and Talks
Filament slow on large table? Optimize with Postgres partitions
When I started working on a client project, I ran into a familiar challenge: a Filament Resource managing millions of sensor measurements.
From Docker Errors to Production-Ready: Building a PHP Microservices CI/CD Pipeline
What started as a simple PHP project evolved into a deep dive into DevOps practices, container orchestration, and automation. Here's my journey, complete with code snippets, painful lessons, and hard-won victories.
PHP SPL: Stack and Queue Tutorial
SPL (Standard PHP Library) is a collection of built-in data structures and interfaces designed to solve common problems efficiently.
Laravel Artisan Commands – Practical Tutorial
php artisan is Laravel’s command-line interface. It helps you generate code, manage the app lifecycle, work with the database, debug, and maintain the project efficiently.
Building a Serverless PHP Application with Bref, Symfony, and DynamoDB Session Management
Serverless apps are fantastic for automatic scaling, but there’s a catch: they expect you to be stateless. Most web applications, however, rely on sessions to remember users and persist state.
Production-Ready ElasticSearch with Symfony 7.4: The Senior Guide
In the modern web ecosystem, “search” is not just about finding text; it is about performance, relevance and user experience. As a Senior Symfony Developer, you know that LIKE %…% queries are a technical debt trap.
Improve your PHP code quality: How to set up PHP CS FIXER
PHP CS Fixer is an essential tool that automatically enforces consistent coding standards across your PHP projects. By automatically fixing issues with indentation, spacing, naming conventions, and code style, it ensures your entire team writes clean, maintainable code that follows the same rules.
How to Get Barcode Values from a Document using AI in PHP
Using the below code examples, we can implement a document AI barcode extraction API for our PHP application with ease.
Master the Art of API Design with Laravel: Best Practices for 2026
Building a robust API is more than just returning JSON from a controller. It’s about creating a predictable, secure, and scalable interface that other developers (and your future self) will love to use.
Refactoring If-Else Hell into a Strategy Pattern in PHP
In many PHP codebases, long conditional chains are not just a code smell — they are a liability. |
News and Announcements
Laravel Introduces Official AI Documentation
Laravel has published a new AI Assisted Development section in the Laravel 12.x documentation, providing first-party guidance on using AI tools effectively within Laravel applications.
What's new in Filament v4.5?
We're excited to announce the release of Filament v4.5! We hope you had a restful holiday break. While things were quieter over Christmas and New Year, the core team and community have still been shipping. Here's a summary of our favourite new features from v4.4 and v4.5.
Laravel Gets a Claude Code Simplifier Plugin
Taylor Otwell has released a new Laravel-focused plugin for Claude Code that brings automated code cleanup directly into Laravel and PHP workflows.
Laravel 12.45.1, 12.45.2, and 12.46.0 Released
Laravel released three new framework versions on January 7, 2026, bringing valuable new array and collection helpers, enhanced Gate authorization with enum support, and several important bug fixes.
January 5–11, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #993
This week, Symfony development activity focused on fixing bugs and updating tests to make them compatible with the newest PHPUnit versions. Meanwhile, the upcoming Symfony 8.1 release started adding new features, such as a new attribute for interactive choice questions in console commands. Finally, Symfony UX introduced a new Toolkit package.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
The Stack Overflow: Vibe code anything in a Hanselminute
Ryan welcomes back the mighty Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community at Microsoft, for a crossover episode about all things vibe coding.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 702: Derick Schaefer on Modern CLIs
In this episode, Derick Schaefer, author of CLI: A Practical Guide to Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces, talks with host Robert Blumen about command-line interfaces old and new.
Developer Tea: Career Growth Accelerator - Assessing Yourself - Using a Nine-Block to Map Your Skill, Potential, and Energy Investment
Most career assessments try to paint a static picture of what you can do well with the least effort, but they often fail to provide a practical roadmap for your next career move.
Shoptalk Show: Web Install API, Resizing Text, Active View Transition Type
We're talking new stuff (to us) that we haven't chatted about yet like display:grid-lanes, the web install API, resizing text on the web, scroll triggered animations, active view transition type, and a Quick Look at CodePen v2 features.
WP Builds: 451 – The realities of teaching WordPress: Dave Foy’s shift to live cohort learning
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with Dave Foy about his journey from classroom teaching to creating online WordPress courses.
PHP Architect: The PHP Podcast 2026.01.08
This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John talk about Welcome to 2026, Denmark stops postal services, New Laravel employee, PHPTek Early Bird ending soon, the pains of making a living off open source, PHP is Back according to Nuno, and more.
Mostly Technical: 115: Do You Wanna Win?
Ian and Aaron talk about opinionated frameworks in the era of AI, Aaron's new pivot (!), Ian being right, and so much more.
Syntax: This guy is nuts (TypeScript Doom)
Scott and Wes sit down with Dimitri Metropolis to explore the wild edges of TypeScript—from running Doom in the type system to building tools like Typeslayer.
The Changelog: Linus Torvalds gets the AI coding bug
Linus Torvalds pushes AI generated code, Jordan Fulghum thinks this is the year of self-hosting, FracturedJson formats for compact / human readability, Scott Werner believes a flood of adequate software is coming, and Sean Goedecke explains why generic software design advice is useless.
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The Truth Behind Tech AI Layoffs
I had to speak about the recent tech AI layoffs we've seen out there.
Why I Divorced Laravel Observers
Today, I will to talk about why I abandoned Observers. For years, I was a natural Laravel power user. If the documentation mentioned a feature, I used it. Observers felt like a superpower. You could keep your controllers slim and your logic “clean” by hiding everything inside a UserObserver.
The Ultimate Image Solution for Symfony - stop writing srcset manually
Enter PGI (Progressive Image Bundle)—the new standard for image handling in Symfony 6.4 and newer versions.
Why I built another Audit Bundle for Symfony
When I started my latest Symfony project, I looked at the existing options for entity auditing. While there are some massive, well-established bundles out there, I ran into a few common headaches.
A Weekend Debugging Session That Turned Into a Cybercrime Investigation
It was a quiet Saturday afternoon. The kind where you grab a coffee, maybe check on a side project you haven’t touched in months. That’s exactly what I did. I opened my browser, typed in the URL of my web crawler app, and waited.
MutedBoard: Building a Forum Framework to Understand Software From the Inside.
MutedBoard is a forum/blog web application framework, but more than that, it’s a personal learning experiment. I didn’t start it to compete with existing forum software. I started it to understand how forum software actually works internally, from the ground up.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
royvoetman/flysystem-gitlab-storage
Flysystem Adapter for the Gitlab Repository files API v4.
royvoetman/laravel-gitlab-storage
A Gitlab Storage driver for Laravel.
fsi/json-builder
JSON builder with escaping control for PHP 5.6+
princejohnsantillan/id-base-converter
Encode integer IDs using a preset or customized symbol set.
swisnl/php-cs-fixer-bitbucket
PHP CS Fixer reporter for Bitbucket Pipeline Reports.
icehouse-ventures/laravel-chartjs
Simple package to facilitate and automate the use of charts in Laravel using the Chart.js library.
borsodigerii/php-xml-chunker
A lightweight, fast, and optimized XML file splitter with build in tag data validation, written with the XMLParser library.
mykeels/laravel-filters
Provides a composable interface for data filtering with query strings.
typo3/cms-webhooks
TYPO3 CMS Webhooks - Handle outgoing Webhooks for TYPO3.
onramplab/laravel-auditing-log
A Laravel package providing auditing log.
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Jobs
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