Tracing a PHP CLI application with filo filo is a zero-extension PHP call tracer. No PECL module, no Xdebug session: it registers a file:// stream wrapper and rewrites your code’s AST on the way in, so every function entry and exit gets timed. Your files on disk are never touched: instrumented copies live in a […]
14
Sep
Sep
PHP Property Resolution Order: Class · Trait · Parent · Interface PHP offers the same four places to define a property that it offers for constants: directly in a class, in a trait the class uses, in a parent class it extends, and, as of PHP 8.4, in an interface it implements. Since these different […]
12
Sep
Sep
RisingWave, PHP, and the Streaming Database Idea A regular database answers the question you ask it, once, against whatever state happens to be sitting on disk at that moment. If the data changes a second later, your answer is stale until you ask again. This is why dashboards poll, and why “real-time analytics” has historically […]
10
Sep
Sep
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 […]
10
Sep
Sep
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, […]
09
Sep
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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Sep
Sep
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, […]
07
Sep
Sep
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 ][c after school, sailing between Hong Kong and Shanghai, smuggling Opium, dodging Li Yuen’s pirate fleet. There were no saves, so when we wanted to […]
04
Sep
Sep
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 […]
03
Sep
Sep
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 […]