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Another fun episode of the PHP Podcast! Here’s what we covered:

Internet Woes & Technical Difficulties
Eric continued his saga with connectivity issues, dropping multiple times on Zoom calls and even during the podcast. After trying everything from coax cable converters to different network setups, he’s considering just running a new network cable to his office. The Wi-Fi experiment during the show… didn’t go great.

First Waymo Experience
John shared his first ride in a Waymo self-driving car! While the wife wasn’t thrilled about having to walk to a specific pickup spot, the experience was pretty impressive. One weird moment: the car got confused by a bus at a 45-degree angle and started creeping into the left lane. Overall verdict: comfortable, cheaper than Uber, and no awkward small talk required.

Eric’s Coding Adventure
In a rare “Eric writes code” moment, he debugged a POC project by littering the codebase with 15+ write-to-log statements (because who needs X debug?). The culprit? A renamed variable he forgot to update elsewhere. Classic. John was horrified to learn there’s no static analysis running. The demo went well… until someone asked to see the customer interface.

MySQL 8.0 → 8.4 Upgrade Planning
John’s been preparing for the MySQL 8.0 to 8.4 upgrade (8.0 is end of life). The previous team left amazing documentation, but there’s one major issue: the DBA rejected converting from utf8mb3 to utf8mb4 character set because the tables are so massive it would lock them for way too long. That’s a problem for future John.

AWS S3 Cleanup – 75 Million Files!
John tackled a years-old problem: phone call recordings stored as both WAV and MP3 files in S3. The cleanup script identified 75 million WAV files to delete, which took a day and a half to process. Potential savings: $100/day. Joe asked about intelligent tiering, which… yeah, probably should look into that.

PHP Tek 2026 – 68 Days Away!
The conference schedule is live! Four tracks (three PHP Tek + one JS Tek), hotel rooms at the discounted rate are going fast, and Eric admitted he skipped Scale this year because he was just too exhausted. Focus is on PHP Tek now!

Laravel 13 Dropping March 17
Laravel 13 is dropping on Tuesday with a focus on moving from protected properties to attributes. According to the article, there are no breaking changes (we’ll see about that). Overall, it’s a light upgrade with some new features but nothing earth-shattering.

March Friday the 13th Anniversary
Eric and Beck’s dating anniversary! They started dating on March Friday the 13th, 1987, when Eric picked her up at 5 PM for a midnight showing of a terrible Burt Reynolds movie called “Heat” (which apparently doesn’t exist according to IMDB). The whole show tried to help figure out what movie it actually was. Spoiler, it was called HEAT

PHPUnit 13 Released
Sebastian Bergmann appeared on PHP Alive & Kicking to talk about PHPUnit 13. The big change: array of assertions. The show also features a hard deprecation of some older methods. Check out the release for all the details.

OpenClaw/Archie AI Success
Eric’s thrilled with how the team is using the OpenClaw AI agent for daily standups. Team members are not only doing their morning standups but updating it throughout the day and even asking it to check for security alerts. The engagement has been way beyond expectations. Now Eric’s fighting the temptation to buy a Mac Mini to run it properly and get it back on Ollama, saving on API costs.

Links from the show:

• PHP Tek 2026 – The Premier PHP Conference
• WiFi Mapping User Guide – Turn your router into a see-through-walls device
• WiFi Mapping Demo on X
• Laravel 13 drops March 17 — here’s every new feature with code examples

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Host:

Eric Van Johnson

• X: @shocm
• Mastodon: @[email protected]
• Bluesky: @ericvanjohnson.bsky.social
• PHPArch.me: @eric

John Congdon

• X: @johncongdon
• Mastodon: @[email protected]
• Bluesky: @johncongdon.bsky.social
• PHPArch.me: @john

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