Hi everyone,
Things are starting to heat up weather-wise, so we hope you all are keeping cool. In this week's newsletter we have tutorials on Using PHP’s Pipe Operator in Laravel Without Forcing It Everywhere, Agent-friendly JSON output for PHP CI tools, and Understanding Correlation in PHP. In Podcast we have new episodes from No Compromises, and this week they discuss why keeping dead code around is slowing your whole team down. North Meets South shares a behind-the-scenes look at organising Laracon AU 2026, while Laravel Podcast talks Marketing Developer Tools with Cynthia McGillis. Finally in our Reading section we have articles on The Anatomy of a Stealthy WP-Injection,Working with Private Symfony Recipes, and Why `mixed` Is the Worst Type in Your PHP Codebase (and How to Kill It).
We have all that and more, so we do hope you enjoy this week's newsletter. If you have an article, tutorial or podcast that you would like to be featured in our newsletter, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].
All the best,
Adrian
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Articles
The Empty String in PHP: One Value, Too Many Jobs
Behind the obvious simplicity of the empty string in PHP lies a surprising amount of overloaded meanings, which leads to misunderstandings. Let’s review some situations.
State Pattern vs. Enums in Modern PHP
When PHP introduced native Enums, they became the perfect fit for this kind of state modeling. They are type-safe, database-friendly, and much cleaner than arbitrary strings spread across the codebase.
Why You Should Stop Using Laravel for Commercial Projects (The Hidden Risks)
Every framework has its honeymoon phase. For PHP developers, Laravel has been that reliable, feature-rich partner for years. It’s elegant, it has an amazing community, and it gets things done fast.
Stop Blaming PHP: Introducing The Performance Bible for Laravel
After years of architecting high-scale systems, I realized that many Laravel developers are missing a foundational understanding of why certain practices are slow.
PHPStan 'expects X, Y given' — the trace it doesn't give you
A few weeks ago I was staring at this: Parameter #1 $amount of method format() expects float, float|null given.
Laravel in 2026: Starter Kits, AI SDK, and the End of the Breeze Era
The original draft was based on material gathered through ChatGPT Deep Research, then heavily revised with additional analysis and commentary from actual ecosystem observation.
WordPress 7.0 Is Here. Will Your PDF Invoice Plugin Survive It?
WordPress 7.0 landed on May 20, 2026. Most of it is plumbing you will never see. But if your store emails invoices, there is a real chance the update quietly changes what those invoices look like, and you will not find out until a customer replies asking why their receipt is full of empty boxes.
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Tutorials and Talks
Laravel MongoDB Full-Text Search tutorial: The Art of the Relevancy
There are very compelling reasons to use a full-text search based on an inverted index and a relevancy scoring model.
How to Hide Out-of-Stock Products on Your WordPress Website
This article outlines a technical method to improve the shopping experience on WordPress websites by automatically hiding out-of-stock products from the main views.
Using PHP’s Pipe Operator in Laravel Without Forcing It Everywhere
Most Laravel developers should not treat PHP's pipe operator as a blanket upgrade. They should treat it as a narrow readability tool that earns its place only when it makes a short transformation chain clearer than the alternatives.
How to Audit a Laravel Codebase You've Inherited
Most businesses don't inherit a Laravel codebase on purpose. A developer leaves. An agency relationship ends. A company is acquired.
Agent-friendly JSON output for PHP CI tools
When an AI agent runs your test suite or a CI gate during an implement-or-review loop, the verbose stdout gets piped straight back into its context window.
Stop N+1 Queries Forever: Advanced Doctrine ORM Strategies in Symfony 8.1
The N+1 query problem is the silent killer of application performance. You build a beautiful new Symfony endpoint, test it locally with a handful of database records and the response time is a lightning-fast 30ms.
PHP fun: Lean theorem in PHP
With the usual programming languages there is the code, and separate from it there is the mental model that is part in the tests and part in the documentation.
Most Used PHP and WordPress Functions: A Developer's Complete Guide
In this guide, we'll explore the functions you'll use every day, with practical examples and explanations following WordPress and WordPress VIP coding standards.
Understanding Correlation in PHP: Pearson vs Spearman vs Kendall Tau
Correlation helps you understand whether two variables move together and how strongly they are related. In this article, you'll learn how Pearson, Spearman, and Kendall tau correlation work, when to use each method, and how to calculate them in PHP with practical examples.
Stop Worker Crashes: Fixing Laravel Queue Memory Leaks in Production
When you deploy a B2B SaaS platform at Smart Tech Devs, your Laravel queues handle the heaviest lifting—processing CSV imports, generating PDF reports, and sending thousands of emails. |
News and Announcements
Storage Cache Store in Laravel 13.10.0
Laravel v13.10.0 introduces a storage cache driver backed by Laravel's filesystem abstraction, making it possible to use an S3 disk (or any configured disk) as a key/value cache store without additional packages.
Manage Laravel Cloud Deployments Inside PhpStorm
JetBrains has shipped a new Laravel tool window in PhpStorm that lets you manage and troubleshoot Laravel Cloud deployments without leaving the editor. It ships as part of the Laravel Idea plugin, which is now free, and includes an AI-assisted troubleshooting flow for failed deploys.
Polyfill 1.38.1 released
Polyfill 1.38.1 is a security release that fixes a vulnerability in symfony/polyfill-intl-idn. All users of this polyfill (directly or through symfony/polyfill) should upgrade as soon as possible. The release also bundles a handful of correctness fixes for the Mbstring, Grapheme, and cURL/MySQL constant polyfills.
May 18–24, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #1012
This week, Symfony released 36 security advisories and published security releases 5.4.52, 6.4.40, 7.4.12, 8.0.12, 8.1.0 BETA3 and Twig 3.26.0.
Frontend Nation 2026 Returns June 3-4 with Laravel in the Lineup
Frontend Nation 2026 is back on June 3-4 for two days of free, online talks, panels, and workshops covering what's hot in web development and AI. Laravel is named in the framework lineup alongside React, Vue.js, Angular, Next.js, Nuxt, Vite, Inertia, and more.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
The Stack Overflow: Do you have what it takes to run AI in production?
From the floor of HumanX, Ryan Donovan is joined by Peter Salanki, CTO and co-founder of CoreWeave, to chat about what it really takes to run AI in production; the growing importance of observability, utilization, and scheduling; and Peter’s advice for avoiding the trap of over-architecting too early.
No Compromises Podcast: Your codebase is not a museum for old code
In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we discuss why keeping dead code around is slowing your whole team down.
North Meets South Podcast: Laracon AU CFP, developer storytelling, and audience engagement
Michael shares a behind-the-scenes look at organising Laracon AU 2026, including the new committee-based CFP review process, the tooling built to manage the talk submissions, and how AI-assisted workflows helped shape the final conference schedule.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 721: Rob Moffat on Risk-First Software Development
In this episode, Rob Moffat, author of Risk-First Software Development and chief technical architect at the FinTech Open Source Software Foundation (FINOS), speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about how all of software development is actually risk management.
Developer Tea: Practice Isn't Enough for Senior Engineers - Adaptation Is a Key Skill in an AI-First Industry
If you're a software engineer right now, you likely feel like your world is changing overnight. We are writing half or less the amount of code that we wrote even a year ago, which represents a seismic, groundbreaking shift in our industry.
Shoptalk Show: Google I/O 2026 Recap Edition
We're running down what's new from Google for the web and figuring out if it's web developer Xmas or AI Doomsday this year.
WP Builds: 469 – Lovekesh Kumar introduces the WPM Package Manager
Nathan Wrigley interviews Lovekesh Kumar, a WordPress engineer at rtCamp, about WPM, a new, secure, Go-based package manager for WordPress plugins and themes.
Laravel Podcast: Marketing Developer Tools with Cynthia McGillis, VP of Marketing
In this episode, Matt Stauffer is joined by Cynthia McGillis to talk about her unlikely path from English major and nonprofit fundraiser to leading marketing at Laravel.
Mostly Technical: 133: Do The Hardest Thing with Jesse Hanley
Aaron is joined this week by Jesse Hanley, founder of Bento, to talk about building a seven figure business, why he feels less stress now than he did when he started, migrating from Heroku to Planetscale, and more.
Syntax: 8 Tech Choices to Lock In Before Agentmaxxing
Wes and Scott talk about the foundational decisions that make AI-assisted coding actually work—database schemas, validation, routing, CSS structure, and more.
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The Anatomy of a Stealthy WP-Injection: How I Traced a Zero-Day Vulnerability through 4 Layers of Obfuscated Code
High-traffic e-commerce stores and enterprise WordPress deployments rarely face noisy defacement attacks. Instead, they face the nightmare scenario: a silent compromise.
How My Docker Setup Saved Me From a Supply Chain Attack (And Why Yours Should Too)
It's finally Friday! You leave work and go home to work on your side project (yep, that's me). You open your computer and start working on it by running composer update because you want to keep your dependencies up to date.
Someone Poisoned Laravel's Most Trusted Packages — 233 Versions, 700 Repos
On May 22, 2026, an attacker spent exactly 15 minutes on a keyboard. When they were done, 233 versions of widely-used PHP packages had been silently replaced with credential-stealing malware.
Why `mixed` Is the Worst Type in Your PHP Codebase (and How to Kill It)
A team I talked to last month had 1,400 mixed return types across their Laravel 11 codebase. PHPStan level 6 was green. Tests passed. A junior dev refactored one helper, and three controllers started returning HTTP 500s in staging. Nothing flagged it. Nothing could.
Don't Leak User Data: Mastering Laravel Octane State
For decades, PHP's greatest architectural advantage was its "share-nothing" architecture. A request comes in, the framework boots up, the database is queried, the response is sent, and then the entire PHP process dies.
Working with Private Symfony Recipes
I got tired of setting up the same things in every Symfony project. Same configs. Same services. Same little pieces of glue code that aren’t hard—but add up. Symfony recipes solve a lot of this. Until you need your own.
Symfony 8.1: A Technical Breakdown of What Actually Matters
Fewer abstractions, less boilerplate, better performance — what the latest release means for PHP developers shipping real applications.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
genealabs/laravel-pivot-events
This package introduces new eloquent events for sync(), attach(), detach() or updateExistingPivot() methods on BelongsToMany relation.
vlucas/valitron
Simple, elegant, stand-alone validation library with NO dependencies.
pixelandtonic/graphql-php
A PHP port of GraphQL reference implementation.
kartik-v/yii2-widget-touchspin
A Yii2 wrapper widget for the Bootstrap Switch plugin to use checkboxes & radios as toggle touchspines (sub repo split from yii2-widgets).
goldspecdigital/oooas
An object oriented approach to generating OpenAPI specs, implemented in PHP.
dereuromark/cakephp-ide-helper
CakePHP IdeHelper Plugin to improve auto-completion.
nystudio107/craft-code-editor
Provides a code editor field with Twig & Craft API autocomplete.
kartik-v/yii2-widget-sidenav
An enhanced side navigation menu styled for bootstrap (sub repo split from yii2-widgets).
monarobase/country-list
List of all countries with names and ISO 3166-1 codes in all languages and data formats for Laravel.
peppeocchi/php-cron-scheduler
PHP Cron Job Scheduler.
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Jobs
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