Hi everyone,
The latest news and updates on php sent straight to your inbox weekly. In this edition of our newsletter, we have articles on API Design Mastery, 5 Under-the-Radar Laravel13 Features Worth Using, and How to Use the Singleton Pattern in Laravel. In Podcasts this week No Compromises discuss where to draw the line when adding methods and logic to PHP enums. Michael and Jake are joined by Jason "JMac" McCreary to talk the impact of AI on Laravel Shift and modern upgrade workflows on North Meets South, while The Changelog chat about topics from open source hits to OpenAI. Finally in our Reading section we have articles on Raw SQL vs Eloquent, The indexer that reindexed everything, and what exactly is Magento2.
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
API Design Mastery: From Engineer to Architect
An API is a contract. It's not just code — it's a promise to every developer who builds on top of it. A broken promise costs companies millions in migration costs, lost trust, and engineering hours.
Flaky Tests in Laravel: Why Your CI Randomly Fails
Flaky tests are tests that sometimes pass and sometimes fail without any meaningful code changes. They are one of the most frustrating problems in modern software development because they slowly destroy trust in your test suite.
How a solo dev builds like a team: freeze the seams, not the plan
Working solo, I never hit the question that breaks most teams: how do two people build two parts of the same system at the same time without stepping on each other.
5 Under-the-Radar Laravel13 Features Worth Using Today
Laravel 13's recent release didn't introduce any breaking changes or headline-grabbing framework overhauls. Instead, they delivered a collection of practical enhancements that improve developer experience in areas many applications rely on every day: queues, task scheduling, caching, and database migrations.
FrankenPHP: The Hidden Gem Revolutionizing Modern Web Development
Move over PHP-FPM. There’s a new application server in town, and it borrows the best tricks from Go and Caddy.
Cross-Manifest Hiding: The package.json Trick Poisoning PHP Environments
On May 22, 2026, a cross-ecosystem supply chain campaign struck eight Packagist (PHP / Composer) packages, including popular Laravel ecosystem starters like devdojo/wave (6,400 GitHub stars) and devdojo/genesis.
The Single Source of Truth: How I Use the Singleton Pattern in Laravel
When you are building applications, most of the classes you write are meant to be spun up over and over again. Every time a user requests a data model or a new form validation routine, Laravel happily creates a fresh instance (an instance is a live, individual copy of a class built in your server’s memory) uses it, and throws it away.
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Tutorials and Talks
'Command not found' — and what's really blocking WP-CLI
If you've set up WP-CLI on a shared host using a browser-based file manager, you may have hit exactly this. The file exists, permissions are 755, size is 6.8 MB (matches the official PHAR). And yet it refuses to run. The "command not found" message can hide an entirely different problem underneath.
Generating JSON Schema from PHP DTOs with Symfony Serializer awareness
A PHP project that serializes and deserializes DTOs often needs a JSON Schema for them — for an LLM's structured output, for API documentation, or to validate incoming payloads.
How to Use OpenAI API with PHP (Complete Guide, 2026)
PHP powers a large part of the web, but most AI tutorials focus on Python. This guide fills that gap: a complete OpenAI PHP tutorial with working code you can use in any PHP project or Laravel app.
Processing Millions without Memory Crashes: Laravel Lazy Collections
When developing an enterprise B2B SaaS platform at Smart Tech Devs, processing large arrays of internal data is inevitable.
Decoupling Monoliths: Event-Driven Architecture in Laravel
When you first scaffold a B2B SaaS platform at Smart Tech Devs, your application logic is straightforward. A client registers an account, and you save their credentials. But as enterprise features scale, your core code blocks become brittle. Suddenly, the user registration controller is doing ten things at once.
How to Detect and Redact Data Leaks in Documents Using PHP
Manually reviewing documents for sensitive data works fine… until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t. If there’s a social security number in a shared report, or a bank account number in an export that went to the wrong place, that’s a major problem.
How I Integrated SSLCommerz Payment Gateway in Laravel (Without Any Package)
A step-by-step guide to integrating SSLCommerz into a Laravel e-commerce API — using pure cURL, no third-party package required. |
News and Announcements
Bulk Job Dispatching with Bus::bulk() in Laravel 13.13
The Laravel team released v13.13.0 with a new method for dispatching many jobs in a single batch, storage-backed attachment helpers for notifications, PSR-18 support for the HTTP client, and a handful of validation and database fixes.
Community Laravel Extension for Zed
Laravel for Zed, by Mike Bronner, is a community extension that adds Laravel awareness to the Zed editor. It runs a Language Server Protocol engine that parses your PHP and Blade files with tree-sitter — static analysis only, no application code executed — to drive features like go-to-definition and rename.
PHP 8.4.22 & PHP 8.5.7 Released!
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 8.4.22 & PHP 8.5.7. This is a bug fix release.
New in Symfony 8.1: Console Progress and Testing Improvements
The Console component has been a major focus of Symfony 8.1, and we've already covered a lot of new features in previous articles: improved console input, console argument resolvers, method-based commands, and HTTP-less Symfony applications. This article showcases more console improvements related to styling and testing.
June 1–7, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #1014
This week, Symfony focused on bug fixes for the recent Symfony 8.1 release. Meanwhile, we published more details about the upcoming SymfonyOnline June 2026 conference.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
The Stack Overflow: Making the OWASP top ten in the vibe code era
Ryan welcomes back Tanya Janca, now part of the OWASP Top 10 team, to discuss what changed in the latest OWASP Top 10 release, how the list shifted from “outdated components” to a broader software supply chain focus, and why they added memory safety and vibe-coding as awareness items.
No Compromises Podcast: How much logic is too much logic in a PHP enum
In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we discuss where to draw the line when adding methods and logic to PHP enums.
North Meets South Podcast: Fast Laravel with Jason McCreary
Michael and Jake are joined by Jason "JMac" McCreary to talk the impact of AI on Laravel Shift and modern upgrade workflows, and his latest Fast Laravel course focused on edge caching and application performance.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 723: Dave Airlie on Linux Kernel Maintenance
Dave Airlie, a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about Linux kernel maintenance.
Developer Tea: Principles Oriented Thinking as a Durable Skill in an AI First World
The skills that survive every industry shakeup aren't the ones you can Google — they're softer, harder to name, and far more durable. In this episode, Jonathan explores principle-oriented thinking: the practice of stripping away the labels we attach to tools, roles, and even ourselves to see what something actually does at its core.
Shoptalk Show: 3D Printing Life Upgrades, Don’t Give Away Your Dopamine, and CodePen App Deploys
Dave's upgrading his office with a 3D printer, Chris is ordering 3D printed parts for his van, using mobile Starlink, Chris redesigned his website, playing puzzle games like Statedoku, Chess Peace, and Clues by Sam, how CodePen is going to support pointing domains at your app, and what Vite getting bought by Cloudflare signals.
PHP Architect: The PHP Podcast 2026.06.04
Mark your calendars: PHP Tek 2027 is happening April 27–29 in Chicago, and Eric and John are shaking things up. Rather than a straight three-day PHP conference, next year gets three tracks — two of which are familiar PHP-focused content, and a third specialty track that rotates each day.
Syntax: tmux + Terminal Maxxing with Ben Vinegar
Scott and Wes sit down with Ben Vinegar, former Syntax GM and founder of Modem.dev, to geek out over terminal-maxxing, from SSH-based development and tmux workflows to AI-powered coding agents.
The Changelog: From open source hits to OpenAI
This week I’m talking with Max Stoiber, currently working on ChatGPT’s plugin directory and app platform at OpenAI.
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Replacing five Figma files with one HTML renderer for our content brand
This article is the pattern, with working code in Laravel, the bits I got wrong, and when this is the wrong approach.
Typed Eloquent boundaries without building a second ORM
Most Laravel teams do not need to "fix" Eloquent. They need to stop letting raw model state leak too far into code that makes real business decisions.
What Is Magento 2? Understanding One of the Most Powerful Ecommerce Platforms
Among these platforms, Magento has earned a reputation for being incredibly powerful, highly customizable, and capable of supporting large-scale ecommerce operations. At the same time, it's often considered one of the more complex platforms to learn and maintain. So what exactly is Magento 2, and why do businesses continue to invest in it?
Yii3 : From fat controllers to single action classes
If you’ve worked with Yii2, you know the pattern well. One controller file, a bunch of action*() methods, all sharing the same constructor. It works. It ships. But as the codebase grows, you start feeling it.
Raw SQL vs Eloquent: When to use which
Laravel gives you two powerful ways to talk to your database: the expressive Eloquent ORM and direct Raw SQL via the Query Builder. Both have their place — but knowing when to reach for which can be the difference between a sluggish app and a performant one.
The indexer that reindexed everything
How a 30-minute audit cut our Magento reindex triggers by 70% — and a playbook you can run on Monday morning.
A decade of one small library: why open source matters, and how to do SFTP in PHP
This article covers why open source is worth maintaining, then gives a complete, practical guide to doing SFTP in PHP with it.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
staudenmeir/eloquent-eager-limit
Laravel Eloquent eager loading with limit.
mismatch/opentelemetry-auto-redis
OpenTelemetry Auto-Instrumentation for PHP-Redis and Predis.
tomasvotruba/bladestan
PHPStan rule for static analysis of Blade templates,
ixudra/curl
Custom PHP Curl library for the Laravel framework.
friendsofcake/search
CakePHP Search plugin using PRG pattern.
spatie/laravel-screenshot
Take screenshots of web pages in Laravel apps.
simple-bus/message-bus
Generic classes and interfaces for messages and message buses.
sti3bas/laravel-scout-array-driver
Array driver for Laravel Scout.
statamic/eloquent-driver
Allows you to store Statamic data in a database.
jaybizzle/laravel-crawler-detect
A Laravel package to detect web crawlers via the user agent.
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