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

Elizabeth Barron’s New Role – We discussed Elizabeth Barron’s appointment as Executive Director of the PHP Foundation and recommended checking out the extended Alive & Kicking interview from Tuesday (it’s really good!).

ElephantAlert.com Launch – Joe from the PHP Architect team launched a new community resource for tracking PHP elephant plushie sales! Never miss a limited edition elephant again at elephantalert.com – a fun way to stay updated on the collectibles the community loves.

Real Coding Stories – Eric shared his experience going “old school” and manually coding an S3 image upload feature with workflow triggers after Claude kept misinterpreting the requirements. Sometimes you just gotta type it yourself!

AI Reality Check – An honest discussion about AI’s current limitations: the promise vs. the reality of productivity gains, struggles with OpenClaw workflows, the frustration of repeated formatting issues, and concerns about junior developers being over-relied upon with AI tools. Eric’s worried we’re approaching an “AI unraveling” moment in the industry.

AI in Healthcare – Eric had to opt-in to AI-assisted medical procedures at a doctor’s appointment – a glimpse into how AI is spreading into high-stakes environments (and potential liability nightmares).

Laravel Artisan TUI – Eric’s excited about Artisan Browse, a new terminal user interface (TUI) for Laravel’s Artisan commands. Perfect for his tmux workflow! Nothing you *need*, but everything you *want* when you live in the terminal.

SlideWire Released – Wendell (who writes the PHP Enterprise column) released SlideWire – a package for creating presentations using Blade and Livewire. Eric’s planning to use it for his next talk (maybe the PHP Tech opening?).

Magazine Updates – February print issue finally shipped after the usual back-and-forth with the printer about safe print areas. Features a monster-themed FrankenPHP cover that’s quickly becoming a favorite!

Laravel 13 Official Release – Laravel 13 is now the default version! No breaking changes expected, lots of attribute updates in the framework. Pretty smooth upgrade path for most projects.

PHP UK Videos Live – PHP UK conference videos are now available on their YouTube channel. Chris and Mike attended and had a great time!

PHP Tek 2026 Countdown – Just 61 days away! Schedule is posted (though still subject to minor adjustments). Remember: your ticket includes access to PHP Tech TV for all recorded talks, so don’t stress about conflicts.

PHP Internals Discussion – Covered the “PHP Community” RFC proposing ways to make PHP development more community-driven with faster iteration. Eric and John discussed the balance between community input and maintaining code quality/stability – suggesting perhaps a community vote that counts as a weighted portion of the total RFC votes.

DevOps Wins – Eric successfully migrated all sites from Envoyer to Laravel Forge’s new zero-downtime deployment feature, saving money and simplifying the stack. Sometimes consolidation is the right move!

Pool Player App Updates – John’s dealing with real-world edge cases now that his pool league management app is in production. Main pain point: email notifications going to spam. Twilio SMS integration coming soon to solve the time-sensitive notification problem.

3D Printing Crunch Time – John was up until 2 AM printing keychains for his wife’s school fun run (thought he had a week, turns out it was the next day). The hum of the printer became the unofficial background soundtrack of the episode!

Links from the show:

• • ElephantAlert.com – Community PHP Elephant Sales Tracker
  • Artisan Browse – TUI for Laravel Artisan
  • SlideWire – Presentations with Blade and Livewire
  • Laravel 13 Documentation
  • PHP UK Conference YouTube Channel
  • PHP[tek] 2026 – May 19-23, Chicago
  • PHP Community RFC – Faster Moving Community Driven PHP
  • Laravel Forge
  • PHP Score – Technical Debt Monitoring

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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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