The 90% Query Optimization & The Future of PHP

This week: A massive Laravel performance case study, PHP 8.5’s pipe operator explored, and what’s next for PHP 8.6.

Thanks to everyone who checked out 🐤 Whisper Money after the last newsletter.

The response has been excellent—the repo crossed 220+ stars and we now have ~100 users actively testing the encryption and categorization logic.

However, to make this the most secure finance tracker on the market, I need more engineers breaking things and providing feedback.

If you haven’t taken a look at the Laravel 12 / PHP 8.4 codebase yet, or if you want to try the hosted version, the launch deal is still active:

• Coupon: Use code FOUNDER to get your first month for just $1.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Now, let’s wrap up 2025 with some major PHP performance wins.

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PHP

📚 PHP 8.5 Pipe Operator (|>) – Is It Worth Using?

PHP 8.5 recently landed, so I wanted to try out some of the new stuff. Today I’m diving into the pipe operator (|>).

📚 PHP fun: Signing C2PA with Let’s Encrypt

I was made aware of C2PA in a video where they talked about how to be sure video, images and documents come from the claimed source. And they explained C2PA as going from http to https.

📚 The Safety Fuse of Software: Implementing Circuit Breaker in PHP

We’ve all been there: You build a fantastic web application, everything is running smoothly, and then — boom. A third-party API you rely on (maybe for currency rates or a shipping provider) starts lagging.

📚 How to check if a string contains specific words in PHP

There are multiple ways to check if a string contains any words from the given array using PHP. You can check one specific word or multiple words from an array.

📚 How to Send Email in PHP: Complete SMTP and API Guide

In this PHP tutorial, I’ll walk you through how to send emails effectively and securely using SMTP and through an email API.

📚 CakePHP File Management Solution

Meet the New FileStorage Plugin. There’s a new player on the CakePHP block, and it’s bringing modern architecture, clean abstractions, and production-ready code to solve file management once and for all.

📚 PHP 8.1.34, PHP 8.4.16, PHP 8.2.30, PHP 8.3.29 & PHP 8.5.1 Released

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 8.1.34, PHP 8.4.16, PHP 8.2.30, PHP 8.3.29 & PHP 8.5.1. This is a security release.

📚 PHP 8.6 kicks off with partial function application

PHP 8.5 is still warm, but the work to push PHP forward continues. The latest major feature for PHP 8.6 has just been approved: Partial Function Application (PFA).

📚 Our PHP Monolith Was Working Fine — So Why Did We Change It?

Most stories about legacy systems start with a crisis. The system was slow, unstable, or hard to maintain. This one didn’t.

📚 Simulating Сoncurrent Requests: How We Achieved High-Performance HTTP in PHP Without Threads

Your PHP app talks to multiple APIs, but its single-threaded nature keeps users waiting. What if you could handle thousands of concurrent requests — without threads, extra processes, or switching languages?

Laravel

📚 PHP Killed Dynamic Properties. Here’s Why (And What to Do)

Starting with PHP 8.2, dynamic properties are deprecated. In PHP 9.0, they’re completely gone. If you’re seeing deprecation warnings in your Laravel 11 projects, this is why.

📚 Say Goodbye to Cronjobs: It’s Time to Use Task Scheduler & Queue in Laravel

There is a much cleaner and more manageable solution in Laravel if your project still uses several cronjobs on the server, such as one for emailing, another for cleanup, and another for backups.

📚 Speeding Up Dashboards - Laravel In Practice EP16

Every time someone loads your dashboard, you’re hitting the database. Every chart, every metric, every time period results in another query. When traffic spikes, your database feels it.

📚 Using Custom Timestamp Columns in Laravel Eloquent

If you need to customize the column names for created_at and updated_at, you can do so at the database level.

📚 Fixing Laravel Boost in Windsurf: A Global MCP Setup Guide

If you’ve tried adding Laravel Boost as an MCP server in Windsurf and hit “cannot initialize server”, you’re not alone.

📚 Running Laravel Sail with Podman on macOS: A Step-by-Step Guide

In this guide, I’ll show you how to run Sail with Podman, step by step, and highlight common pitfalls with solutions.

📚 How I Optimized Database Queries by 90% in a Laravel Application

When I inherited a Laravel application that was struggling with performance issues, the biggest bottleneck wasn’t the code—it was how we were querying the database.

📚 Supercharging Laravel CI/CD Pipeline: From 9 Minutes to 2 Minutes with Pre-built MySQL Images and Parallel Testing

In this article, I’ll walk you through how I reduced our GitLab CI pipeline execution time from 9+ minutes to just 2 minutes, 4.5x improvement by implementing pre-built MySQL Docker images and Laravel’s parallel testing capabilities.

📚 Flash Data in Inertia.js 2.3.3

Inertia.js added support for Flash Data, which sends one-time data to your frontend that shouldn’t reappear as users navigate through the browser history.

📚 Laravel 12.43 Released

The Laravel team released version 12.43, featuring new Eloquent collection methods to merge attribute visibility across a collection, make the HTTP client response macroable, and more.

📚 When “Simple” Problems Aren’t Simple: Hard-Learned Lessons from PHP’s Hidden Gems

I thought I was a decent PHP developer. I knew Laravel, wrote clean code, and shipped features on time. Then a “simple” CSV import feature taught me I’d been solving the wrong problems all along.

📚 Mastering PHP Attributes: From Zero to Hero

Deep dive into PHP 8+ attributes - learn to build custom attributes, attribute-based routing, and powerful validation systems with real-world.

📚 Using Custom Timestamp Columns in Laravel Eloquent

If you need to customize the column names for created_at and updated_at, you can do so at the database level.

Symfony

📚 20 Years of Symfony in Code Stats

In 2025, we’re celebrating 20 years of Symfony. Over these years, thousands of people have contributed code to Symfony. Some folks fixed a small typo in a comment, while others added more than 100,000 lines of code. All contributions are welcome and essential in a project as large and impactful as Symfony.

📚 Building a Decentralized Event Ticketing System Web3 with Symfony 7.4

In this article, we will build the backbone of a Decentralized Event Ticketing System using Symfony 7.4 and PHP 8.3.

📚 December 15–21, 2025 - A Week of Symfony #990

This week, we published an article about how we controlled 1,200 screens in real time with Symfony during SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025. We also celebrated a new SymfonyCasts course on building Symfony bundles. Finally, we shared a blog post detailing 20 years of Symfony coding in numbers.

📚 Scaling Symfony 7.4 in the Cloud: Mastering the New “Share Directory”

In this artice, we will explore the new var/share directory, understand the critical problem it solves and implement a robust, production-ready configuration using Symfony 7.4, Doctrine and Flysystem.