Taming Workflows and Server Nightmares
Dive into building robust business workflows, a cautionary tale about Laravel’s scheduler, and tips for wrangling legacy code.
As August draws to a close, it feels like the last deep breath before the final sprint to the end of the year. It’s often when the ghosts of projects past come back to haunt us. I was chuckling reading this week’s cautionary tale, ‘Laravel Scheduling Nearly Killed Our Server.’ It reminded me of a time a few years back when a seemingly innocent background job at my fintech company decided to spawn infinite processes. We spent a frantic afternoon untangling the mess, a classic case of a simple tool causing a complex problem.
That experience hammered home the importance of understanding the fundamentals, whether it’s a simple cron or a complex business process. That’s why the article on ‘Building Workflows in PHP’ is such a timely read. It’s a great piece on structuring the beating heart of your application, moving beyond simple scripts to robust, manageable processes.
From architecting workflows and refactoring legacy systems with AI’s help to a packed schedule of upcoming conferences, there’s plenty in this issue to get your gears turning. Let’s dive in!
PHP
Almost any business requires workflows. Whether you’re processing orders, onboarding customers, or handling document approvals, these processes are the beating heart of your application.
📚 Examples of Strategy Patterns in PHP
Payment Processing: Different customers may want to pay differently.
📚 A New Observer Pattern: Bidirectional Signals from the Emitter’s Perspective in PHP
In software, the traditional observer pattern is often designed with the observer in mind: an event happens, like a user logging in, and a handler — say, a logger — reacts by recording it.
📚 25 PHP Shortcuts for the Modern Code Wizard (Part 1 of 3)
You know the basics. This three-part series is for daily PHP craftsmen who want cleaner intent, fewer bugs, and production-grade efficiency. Part 1 covers modern language features that change how you design APIs, DTOs, and call sites.
📚 Integrating PHP Applications with Docker: A Beginner’s Guide
In this article, we’ll explore how to integrate PHP applications with Docker to enhance your development workflow.
Longhorn PHP is back for 2025 - and our schedule and speakers list is now live! The conference will be held in Austin, Texas, and will start with an optional tutorial day on Thursday, October 23, followed by two days full of talks and keynotes plus open spaces and more, on Friday and Saturday, October 24-25.
📚 CakeFest: The Cakephp Conference: Madrid, Oct 9th - 10th 2025
Every spring we hold our annual conference dedicated to CakePHP. For the past 10 years, the framework has been a benchmark for PHP development, providing developers with a full MVC stack solution to build powerful applications which scale.
📚 International PHP Conference Munich 2025: Date: October 27 ‒ 31, 2025
The International PHP Conference is the world’s first PHP conference and stands since more than a decade for top-notch pragmatic expertise in PHP and web technologies.
📚 Composition over Inheritance — it’s not always one or the other!
You may have heard “Prefer composition over inheritance” shouted about a lot in software design, it’s something that’s been accepted for a very long time. Inheritance has a bad name due to how easy it is to end up with a bad, fragile hierarchy.
📚 Using Copilot with Legacy PHP: Lessons from Refactoring, Database Migration, and AI Hallucinations
Amongst all the challenges I have faced in my long career, this one stood out as particularly unique and humbling: working with legacy PHP systems, migrating them from a legacy database to PostgreSQL, performing large-scale refactoring, and doing all of this while no test cases existed and business logic had to remain untouched.
📚 Beyond sockets with PHP: Faking it
In the real world, people fake a lot of stuff and when folks notice, eyebrows are bound to rise. Well, today we’re going to be faking real-time. At least, the kind of faking that won’t get you into trouble with society, unless… whispering (they’re programmers).
📚 MongoDB and PHP: Creating Your Own Framework
This article will provide a complete code demo of a Not Ready For Production issue tracker called Gesundheit. Get it? “Issue!” “Gesundheit!” (Sorry, dad joke.)
Laravel
📚 Building a Scalable REST API Architecture in Laravel — The Right Way
Laravel makes it easy to spin up APIs quickly. A couple of controllers, a few routes, and you’re shipping.
📚 Using SQLite in production with Laravel
SQLite is a great database for many, if not most Laravel applications. When well-configured (we’ll get to that), it can provide great performance even if your app has a lot of concurrent requests.
📚 Laravel’s Enhanced String Validation with Inverse Methods
String validation in Laravel applications frequently involves checking what content should NOT match certain patterns. Laravel’s new inverse string methods eliminate awkward negation logic, creating more intuitive and maintainable validation code.
📚 Building a Custom Server-Side DataTable in Laravel Without Packages
In this article, I’ll demonstrate how to implement server-side DataTables processing from scratch without relying on packages like Yajra Laravel DataTables.
📚 Laravel Project Backup to Azure Blob with Bash Script
If you’re running a Laravel app and want an easy way to back it up to Azure Blob Storage without Docker images or third-party SaaS tools, here’s a self-contained Bash script that does exactly that.
📚 Laravel 12 Rollback a Specific Migration
In this guide, we’ll walk through how to rollback a specific migration in Laravel 12 with clear examples.
📚 Filament Email Verification: Leveraging Laravel’s Event System
In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to trigger an event when a user’s email is verified in a Filament application.
📚 How to Use DB Transactions in Laravel 12
In web development, maintaining data integrity is crucial. Imagine a blog post where you need to create the post itself and its related tags simultaneously.
📚 Copy Errors as Markdown to Share With AI in Laravel 12.25
The Laravel team released v12.25.0 with a “Copy as Markdown” button on the error page, defining allowed URL patterns when preventing stray requests in the HTTP client, and more.
📚 Understanding Laravel Models and Eloquent Relationships (Beginner-Friendly)
If you’re building web applications in Laravel, understanding models and their relationships is key to managing your data efficiently.
📚 Laravel Scheduling Nearly Killed Our Server
Never in a million years did I picture my production environment crashing because of something as simple and unassuming as cron jobs. Yet there I was, staring at a server being eaten alive by Laravel’s scheduled tasks, wondering how something so routine could turn into such a nightmare.
Symfony
📚 Pivoting from Auth0 to PHP Symfony
These days when creating a system there are many different ways of setting up authentication. However the main options boil down to: a self made solution, a Aaas solution (authentication as a service) or a combination of the two.
📚 Symfony Translation: Step by Step Guide
Let’s say you need to translate your website into other languages. At first, it might seem complicated, but with Symfony everything is simple and well-organized. No more worries!
📚 August 18–24, 2025: A Week of Symfony #973
This week, Symfony development focused on improving the IsGranted attribute with a new option, updated the Route attribute to allow setting multiple environments, improved the DomCrawler component to use the native HTML5 parser when using PHP 8.4 or newer and marking the JsonPath, JsonStreamer, and ObjectMapper components as no longer experimental.