Hi everyone,
Weekly news and updates in one ewsletter all about PHP. This week we have articles on PHP Namespaces, Laravel Octane, and why PHP’s Problem Isn’t the Language — It’s How We Write It. In tutorials we have guides on Deploying Laravel on Shared Hosting, Best Practices for the Symfony AI Agent Component, and Pragmatic application caching with Symfony Cach. Finally in our Reading section we have articles on Modeling Events & Speakers in WordPress, Building a Supabase Driver for Keboola Connection, and Infrastructure Before Features: Building the Right Things First.
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
Builder Pattern in PHP/Laravel: Building Clean and Flexible Order Objects
In practice, orders in e-commerce systems often evolve over time, which makes them a perfect candidate for the Builder Pattern.
PHP Random String Generation: Best Practices for Passwords, IDs, and Tokens
PHP offers several functions—rand, mt_rand, uniqid, random_bytes, and more. Choosing the wrong one can lead to security vulnerabilities. In this guide, we’ll break down the best methods for generating random strings based on security requirements and specific use cases.
How to Secure Laravel Applications from Common Attacks
Laravel gives you strong tools—but you must use them correctly.
Laravel Octane Explained: When to Use It, How It Works, and How to Deploy
TL;DR — Laravel Octane runs your application on a long-running server (Swoole or RoadRunner). By keeping the framework in memory between requests, it eliminates bootstrap overhead, significantly lowering latency and increasing throughput.
PHP Namespaces Explained: What They Are and Why You Need Them
In this blog, we will learn about Namespaces. Namespaces solve a very common and important problem in PHP. When you build a real project, you don’t write everything in a single file. As your PHP project grows, you start using many classes, functions, and constants across multiple files and libraries.
Laravel AI SDK: What It Changes, Why It Matters, and Should You Use It?
Laravel just shipped something big. On February 5, 2026, Taylor Otwell dropped the Laravel AI SDK, a first party package for building AI-powered features directly in your Laravel apps. And honestly? I've been waiting for this one.
PHP’s Problem Isn’t the Language — It’s How We Write It
Modern PHP can be clean, testable, fast, and boring — in the best way. Most “PHP horror stories” are engineering failures, not language failures.
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Tutorials and Talks
Why Your Livewire Dashboard Jumps (And How to Fix It) - Laravel In Practice EP18
Your real-time dashboard works. New orders come in, the data updates. But every time Livewire re-renders, the entire page jumps back to the top. Your users lose their place, animations break, and the whole experience feels janky.
Make Your Laravel App Feel Instant: The Ultimate Guide to Queues + Horizon
TL;DR: Stop doing slow work in HTTP requests. By setting your QUEUE_CONNECTION to redis, installing Horizon, and offloading heavy lifting to background jobs, your UI returns in milliseconds while the complex work happens behind the scenes.
Deploying Laravel on Shared Hosting (No SSH Required)
In this article, I'll share the exact workflow I use to deploy Laravel applications on shared hosting without SSH access.
How I Built a WhatsApp Order Button for WooCommerce (And Why Every Small Business Needs One)
In this article, I'll share how I built a WhatsApp Order Button for WooCommerce and discuss why every small business should consider this integration.
Laravel AI SDK Tutorial: Build a Smart Assistant in 30 Minutes
I wrote a breakdown of what the AI SDK changes and why it matters when it launched last week. That post covers the "should I use this?" question. This one is the hands-on part.
Building Intelligent PHP Applications: Best Practices for the Symfony AI Agent Component
In this article, we will explore the best practices for implementing symfony/ai-agent in a Symfony 7.4 application. We will focus on clean architecture, type safety and testability — ensuring your AI features are as reliable as your core business logic.
How We Halved Latency in PHP with BigQuery Short Query Mode
In the world of web development, especially with “snap-on” PHP applications, latency is the enemy.
Tuning PHP-FPM: Keep Your PHP Apps Fast Under Load
High traffic can easily overwhelm PHP applications when configurations aren’t optimized. In this guide, I’ll show you how smart tuning keeps performance stable and response times low, even under heavy load.
Pragmatic application caching with Symfony Cache: Pools, Tags and Invalidation
Caching is one of those topics every developer thinks they understand until they hit production.
Mastering Concurrency: Symfony 7.4 Lock Component Best Practices
In high-concurrency applications, race conditions are the silent killers of data integrity. Whether it’s preventing double-booking in a reservation system, ensuring a cron job runs on only one server, or throttling API usage, the Symfony Lock Component is your first line of defense. |
News and Announcements
Filament v5.2.0 Adds a Callout Component
Filament v5.2.0 ships five new features, including a Callout component for highlighting important information in forms, stacked table rows for better mobile readability, and stacked action modals that keep parent modals visible.
OpenAI Releases GPT-5.3-Codex, a New Codex Model for Agent-Style Development
OpenAI introduced GPT‑5.3‑Codex, a Codex model focused on agent-style development workflows where the model can use tools, operate a computer, and complete longer tasks end-to-end.
`hasMany()` Collection Method in Laravel 12.50.0
Laravel v12.50.0 introduces a new hasMany() collection method for checking if a collection contains multiple matching items, along with support for unique queued listeners, typed cache getters, and a new model method for excluding appended attributes.
February 2–8, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #997
This week, the upcoming Symfony 8.1 development activity focused on controllers and attributes. In attributes, we added features like support for "this" variable in IsGranted attribute and support of expressions in MapRequestPayload validation groups. Controllers added features to expose controller metadata throughout the request lifecycle, dispatch events named after controller attributes, and new methods to evaluate expressions or closures in controller attributes.
Laravel Live UK returns to London on June 18-19, 2026
Laravel Live UK, the official Laravel conference for the UK, is heading back to London on June 18-19, 2026.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
The Stack Overflow: The logos, ethos, and pathos of your LLMs
Ryan is joined by Professor Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton University’s AI Lab, to dive into findings from his new book The Laws of Thought, which explores the history of the philosophy, mathematics, and logic that underlie artificial intelligence, and scientists' efforts to describe our minds using mathematics.
North Meets South Podcast: OpenClaw, Arbor, and horseless carriages
Michael and Jake catch up on what’s been occupying their time lately, from AI tooling experiments to new developer workflows, before closing with a broader reflection on how new technologies are often misunderstood at first.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 706: Yechezkel “Chez” Rabinovich on Observability Tool Migration Techniques
Yechezkel “Chez” Rabinovich, CTO and co-founder at Groundcover, joins SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath to discuss the key challenges in migrating observability toolsets. The episode starts with a look at why customers might seek to migrate their existing Observability stack.
Developer Tea: The Meta-Habit of High Performers: How Outer Loops Unlock Growth (Career Growth Accelerator)
In today's episode, we are discussing one of the most common habits I see in high-performing managers and senior engineers. It isn't a single trick, a morning routine, or a specific productivity hack—it is a meta-habit.
Shoptalk Show: Digital Archives, OpenClaw Security Concerns, and @Property Declarations
When Dave dies, who gets his domain name? How OpenClaw is a massive security concern, tips on handling a broad design surface area with a design system, changing database values with text-transform, should you declare CSS properties with @property, and was Chris wrong about CSS?
WP Builds: 455 – Inside podcasting’s evolution: Seth Goldstein on trends, tools, and finding your audience
In this episode, Nathan Wrigley chats with podcasting veteran Seth Goldstein about his 15+ years in the industry. They discuss how easy podcasting has become, the importance of having a plan and process, and how podcasts can serve brands and businesses beyond immediate monetisation.
PHP Architect: The PHP Podcast 2026.02.05
This week on the PHP Podcast, Eric and John talk about Iris, OpenClaw, AI Agents are starting to socialize, NativePHP Mobile is now FREE, Ramsey updates the PHP Architect Wikipedia Page, Notebook++ Hacked, and more.
Mostly Technical: 119: Anti Slop Vibe
Ian and Aaron talk about the launch of Solo, Aaron's new terminal app for the desktop (!) plus Ian's return to Twitter and so much more.
Syntax: We built a CSS Challenge platform
Scott and Wes break down how they built SynHax, the real-time CSS Battle app powering the upcoming Mad CSS tournament.
The Changelog: Vouch for an open source web of trust
Mitchell Hashimoto’s trust management system for open source, Nicholas Carlini has a team of Claudes build a C compiler, Stephan Schwab recounts the history of attempted developer replacement.
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Modeling Events & Speakers in WordPress (The Clean, Scalable Way)
WordPress is great at managing content — until you need real relationships. If you’ve ever built an Events website, you’ve probably heard questions like: Can one Event have multiple Speakers? Can one Speaker appear in many Events? Can editors manage this safely without breaking the site? On the surface, this sounds simple. In reality, it’s one of the most repeated architectural problems in WordPress projects.
Four Spaces Before <?php
I was working on a Livewire component when every interaction started throwing 419 errors. CSRF token mismatch, on every click. The kind of thing that makes you question your setup immediately.
Building a Supabase Driver for Keboola Connection
I spent the past weeks integrating Supabase as an external data source into Keboola Connection. The result is a complete driver with OAuth 2.0, automatic schema discovery, and Supabase Marketplace integration. I also hit some bugs that nearly drove me crazy -- here's the whole story.
Infrastructure Before Features: Building the Right Things First
In my first post related to this project, I'd just finished the foundational layer: authentication, passkeys, 2FA, sessions, billing and account management. I said I was about to start on the actual product features.
How I Stopped Checking amoCRM Every Morning and Built a Telegram Bot Instead
I use amoCRM every day as a small business owner. We do not have a large sales department or a complex hierarchy, but we still rely on pipelines, deals, and tasks. Very quickly I noticed that a significant part of my time was spent not on decision-making, but on repetitive manual checks inside the CRM.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
sbsedv/request-id-bundle
A Symfony bundle that adds a unique Request-ID.
felixfbecker/language-server-protocol
PHP classes for the Language Server Protocol.
liran-co/laravel-notification-subscriptions
Notification subscription management.
timo-lehnertz/formula
An open source PHP formula parser based on https://github.com/socialist/formula.
lexik/jwt-authentication-bundle
This bundle provides JWT authentication for your Symfony REST API.
consolidation/output-formatters
Format text by applying transformations provided by plug-in formatters.
laravel/reverb
Laravel Reverb provides a real-time WebSocket communication backend for Laravel applications.
ergebnis/json-pointer
Provides an abstraction of a JSON pointer.
phootwork/collection
The phootwork library fills gaps in the php language and provides better solutions than the existing ones php offers.
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