The Advantage of Fixing All PHP Warnings I have spent a ungodly amount of my life reading other people’s PHP warnings. Scanning codebases for a living does that to you. And after a few million lines, I’ve come to a conclusion that sounds boring until you think about what it actually means: a warning is […]
24
Oct
Oct
When Your Lint Tool Calls Your Method “Difficult”: A Halstead Story Start with the report itself Static analyzers love to tell you that your method is too long, too complex, or too nested. But every once in a while, one of them produces a warning that feels more personal. This one passes judgment not just […]
22
Oct
Oct
From Commit to Production: How a PHP Fix Actually Reaches You A security fix landed in PHP: 2026, Oct 21st. The announcement is summed up in one line: “2 CVE, fixed in PHP 8.5.12”. Then an impressive machinery, usually invisible, is set in motion, and pushes that fix to your servers. The fix itself has […]
22
Oct
Oct
Recently updated PIE extensions #12 (since October 15th, 2026) 24 PHP Pie extensions were updated. phpolygon/php-vio (2.35.0): PHP extension for GPU rendering (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal), audio, video recording, streaming, and input iliaal/php-excel (2.9.1): PHP extension for reading and writing Excel files using LibXL iliaal/php_clickhouse (0.13.0): Native PHP extension for ClickHouse using the official ClickHouse/clickhouse-cpp client. […]
19
Oct
Oct
Every Road Around the Zend Engine I’ve been using PHP forever, and so I’ve relied on the Zend Engine. After all, it is the core of PHP. The PHP source goes into the Zend Engine, gets parsed into an AST, compiled to opcodes, and executed. One request, one process. That’s just what php does when […]
17
Oct
Oct
PHP has a Spoofchecker: A 14-Year-Old Tool You’re Probably Not Using The Spoofchecker class has shipped with PHP since 5.4, released in March 2012. That’s the same year the iPhone 4S was current, “Gangnam Style” dropped, and PHP 5.3 was still the dominant version on the west. Fourteen years later, most PHP developers, including me, […]
The 2,000th word: a personal notebook became a map of PHP Today the PHP Dictionary reaches its 2,000th definition: bearer token, is the last entry, and, as you can see, it is quite niche subject for a definition and PHP. This is because, over the years, a lot of definitions were added to what was […]
15
Oct
Oct
Recently updated PIE extensions #11 (since October 8th, 2026) 40 PHP Pie extensions were updated. flow-php/arrow-ext (0.46.0): Apache Arrow and Parquet bindings for flow-php/parquet (Rust) iliaal/mdparser (0.8.0): Native C CommonMark + GitHub Flavored Markdown parser for PHP, targeting CommonMark 0.31 + GFM. ~10-20x faster than pure-PHP parsers, zero runtime dependencies. phpolygon/php-vio (2.33.0): PHP extension for […]
14
Oct
Oct
PHP ❤️ Rust: Every Bridge Between Two Worlds An Elephant and a Crab Walk Into a Bar PHP and Rust have been walking toward each other from across the room for years. One is the elephant: over thirty years old, used by about 70% of the websites whose server-side language W3Techs can identify, and believes […]
13
Oct
Oct
foreach Already Knows: PHP and the Zero-One-Infinity Rule <?php foreach ($recipients as $recipient) { $mailer->send($recipient, $message); } ?> This loop doesn’t ask when or if $recipients a list. It doesn’t ask anything, although, well, it does ask for an array or an iterable. Now, when $recipients holds three users, it runs three times. If it […]
09
Oct
Oct
A Hard Memory Ceiling for PHP Scripts That Run for Hours You inherit a legacy table full of auto-incrementing integers and a new architecture that wants UUIDs. You write a CLI worker, build an in-memory lookup array mapping old IDs to new ones, and let it run. Forty thousand rows in, the terminal stops mid-scroll […]