PHP’s Performance Power-Up
Featuring high-speed crypto, advanced caching architectures, and the State of PHP in 2025.
With Halloween just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to talk about the things that scare us as developers. I spent most of last week deep in a legacy microservice here at the fintech, and the lack of proper exception handling was a real horror show. Every unexpected input felt like a jump scare waiting to happen.
It’s a stark reminder of why mastering the fundamentals is so important. That’s why seeing a comprehensive guide to Mastering Try-Catch in PHP this week felt so timely. Building robust, predictable systems is how we keep the real monsters—production bugs—at bay.
On a much brighter note, the future of PHP looks anything but scary. The annual State of PHP 2025 report is out, and it’s packed with exciting insights into how our favorite language is modernizing. From new frameworks to AI-assisted workflows, there’s a lot to be optimistic about. Let’s dive into this week’s findings!
PHP
📚 Building High-Performance Secp256k1 ECDSA for PHP: 2,987 Faster
PHP is rarely used for blockchain applications, and for good reason: pure PHP implementations of secp256k1 ECDSA operations are prohibitively slow.
📚 Building a Production-Ready PHP REST API Framework (Open Source)
After building and managing 25+ enterprise applications (ERP, HRM, CRM, LMS, SaaS), I realized most PHP frameworks are powerful but heavy for small, API-only or microservice projects.
📚 Check If a String is Valid JSON in PHP
There may be times when we need to validate whether a given string is valid JSON. This is especially important when dealing with user input or data from external sources, where the format may not be guaranteed.
📚 Type-Safe Domain Models: Building Architectural Integrity with PHPStan & Psalm
In this article, we’ll explore how PHPStan and Psalm — two powerful static analysis tools — can help you enforce architectural integrity, detect invariant violations, and future-proof your domain.
📚 Mastering Try-Catch in PHP: A Complete Guide to Exception Handling
In this comprehensive tutorial, we’ll explore try-catch blocks in PHP, understand how they work, and learn best practices for handling exceptions like a pro.
The State of PHP 2025 examines how developers use, prefer, and rely on PHP, showing how this long-standing web language continues to modernize through new frameworks, improved tooling, and AI-assisted workflows.
📚 How Yii MVC Architecture Streamlines Web Application Development
In today’s era of modern web development, building applications with efficiency is very important.
📚 Mastering Caching Architectures for High-Traffic PHP Apps
How layered caching can turn your PHP application into a performance powerhouse — and what happens if you get it wrong.
Laravel
PHP 8.5 will be released next month on November 20th, 2025, and will feature the Pipe operator, a new URI extension, new array_first() and array_last() functions, and more.
📚 Laravel APP_KEY vs Password Hashing: What Every Developer Should Know About Encryption & Hashing.
I have been developing solutions with the Laravel framework for a while now, but I have little idea of how encryption works in detail.
📚 Clean Architecture in a Laravel project
“Clean Architecture” is a project structure first mentioned by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob).
📚 Laravel Best Practices That Separate Beginners from Professionals
Writing code is easy. Writing clean, maintainable, and production-ready Laravel code is what separates professionals from beginners.
📚 Boosting App Speed with Flexible Caching - Laravel In Practice EP8
Your cache is fast, but users still hit slow responses when it expires. What if you could serve instant responses even with stale data while Laravel refreshes the cache in the background? Enter Laravel 12’s game-changing flexible caching.
📚 How to Set Up & Use Laravel Telescope for Debugging and Monitoring
Ever wondered what’s happening behind the scenes in your Laravel app? Laravel Telescope gives you full visibility into requests, database queries, exceptions, jobs, mail, notifications, and more.
📚 Supercharge your Laravel API calls with Http::pool()
Did you know you can send multiple HTTP requests in parallel in Laravel, instead of one after another?
📚 Automating MySQL Backups and Imports in Laravel with Artisan Commands
Managing database backups manually can be error-prone and time-consuming — especially across environments.
📚 Support for Closures in Constant Expressions in PHP 8.5
PHP 8.5 introduces support for closures in constant expressions, making it possible to define a default attribute value as a Closure, among other use-cases. The RFC introduction explains what this means from the PHP language perspective.
📚 Failover Queue Driver in Laravel 12.34
The Laravel team released version 12.34.0 this week, introducing a failover queue driver, full-text database search improvements in Laravel Scout, deferring an HTTP client batch, and more.
📚 PHP 8.5 Introduces a New URI Extension
PHP 8.5 introduces a new URI extension, which is a standards-compliant parser “for both RFC 3986 and the WHATWG URL standard as an always-available part of its standard library within a new ‘URI’ extension.”
📚 It’s Not About the Badge: The People Behind Certification for Laravel
When we started building Certification for Laravel, the goal was simple: create a fair, community-driven way to measure real Laravel knowledge.
Symfony
📚 Level Up Your Validations: Pro Techniques for the Symfony Validator
We often associate the Validator component with one primary task: validating entities bound to forms. It’s the trusty gatekeeper that ensures NotBlank, Email, and Length constraints are met before our data hits the database.
📚 Symfony 7.4 is Coming! Your New LTS Bridge to 8.0
Hey, folks! Guess what? Symfony 7.4 LTS — biggest, safest upgrade is coming! The final minor release in any Symfony branch is always the crucial moment where awesome new features meet enterprise stability. It’s the release that truly matters for long-term production stability.
📚 October 13–19, 2025: A Week of Symfony #981
This week, Symfony kept fixing bugs and refining the new features for the upcoming Symfony 7.4 and 8.0 releases. Meanwhile, we unveiled a special site to celebrate Symfony’s 20th anniversary, and we published the first post in the New in Symfony 7.4 series.
📚 Effortless Data Mapping in Symfony: A Deep Dive into the ObjectMapper!
Imagine you’re building a modern API with Symfony. You’re meticulous about your architecture, separating concerns with Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) for incoming request payloads and your Doctrine entities for your database persistence.
📚 Level Up Your DTOs: Pro Techniques for the Symfony ObjectMapper
We often reach for tools that solve immediate problems. When it comes to hydrating objects from raw data, many of us see the ObjectMapper component as a simple tool for turning an array into a DTO. A convenient shortcut, but nothing more.
📚 Modernizing PHPDoc Array annotations with Rector
In one of my project, I’m working with Symfony Serializer, phpstan/phpdoc-parser and phpdocumentor/reflection-docblock to handle serialization of complex objects.