When PHP Reads Something Else: Visual Traps in Source Code PHP code is read by two very different audiences: human developers and the PHP parser. Humans read glyphs, the shapes our eyes recognise. The parser reads bytes or characters, raw octets encoded in a file. Most of the time these two views agree perfectly. Sometimes […]
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Recently updated PIE extensions #6 (since September 3rd, 2026) 33 PHP Pie extensions were updated. intermaterium/duckeh (0.7.3): PHP extension for DuckDB iliaal/mdparser (0.6.1): 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 (2.11.0): PHP extension for GPU rendering (OpenGL, Vulkan, […]
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Sep
PHP-Powered Government Websites by Country After reading the Digital Sovereignty Is Written in PHP, I became curious where in the world is PHP used in the governement. Governments may be large or small, and it may have several departements, ministries, cabinets or even local administrations with competing technologies. For this page, I only collected at […]
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Generate an image of a stereotypical PHP developer That was a popular toot on Bluesky, by Justin Jackson. I thought it would be interesting to make it again, in 2026, so here we go. ChatGPT in 2024 The original image, below, was produced on ChatGPT. It is a cartoon, […]
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13 Modern PHP Tips & Tricks from 2015 PHP has undergone a massive transformation over the last decade. If you’re still writing PHP like it’s 2015, you’re missing out on massive performance gains, cleaner syntax, and better security. I ran into a nice blog post 13 PHP Tips That Make Development Faster from Linet M. […]
Rebuilding Taipan! with an AI Pair Programmer in PHP Taipan! was one of the games that hooked me on computers. My brother and I would play it on the Apple ]
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I Have a Dream of a PHP Preprocessor What if PHP could be faster, stricter, and more expressive, without waiting for PHP 9? What if we could preprocess PHP code into something more optimized, more elegant, or even a completely new dialect? The name itself hints at the possibility: PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. But here, we’re […]
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Recently updated PIE extensions #5 (since August 27th, 2026) 27 PHP Pie extensions were updated. iliaal/mdparser (0.6.0): Native C CommonMark + GitHub Flavored Markdown parser for PHP, targeting CommonMark 0.31 + GFM. ~10-20x faster than pure-PHP parsers, zero runtime dependencies. iliaal/php-excel (2.7.0): PHP extension for reading and writing Excel files using LibXL mongodb/mongodb-extension (2.5.0): MongoDB […]
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Sep
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Tree-sitter and PHP: Two Directions, Endless Possibilities Tree-sitter is a very popular library in the computer ecosystem at large. It powers syntax highlighting in Neovim, structural search in VS Code, and a growing wave of static analysis tools, including in PHP environment. What makes it compelling is a combination of properties rarely found together: a […]
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Adding the last types to PHP code 2026 update note: This is an update of the original 2022 article, with annotations added locally to flag what’s changed in the PHP language since: mainly PHP 8.4’s property hooks and asymmetric visibility, which give native answers to several problems the article works around by hand. Adding the […]
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setlocale() and Its Six Personalities What does setlocale() actually do? It changes the date format, right? It’s a fair guess, and it’s wrong in an interesting way: setlocale() doesn’t touch one behavior, it touches six, and most of them have nothing to do with dates. Under the hood it’s a thin wrapper around the C […]