The PHP Performance Playbook
From faster code and service layers to making your server-rendered apps feel like SPAs.
Welcome to your mid-March dose of PHP wisdom! As spring approaches, it feels like the perfect time to shed some old habits and upgrade our workflows.
Speaking of upgrading workflows, I’m thrilled to share a new open-source CLI tool I’ve been building called 🦅 falcode.
It’s a terminal multiplexer (think tmux) custom-built for multi-agent git worktree workflows.
If you’ve been incorporating AI into your development, falcode automatically discovers your git worktrees and gives each one its own workspace. This allows you to run your AI coding agent, lazygit, and an interactive shell in parallel—meaning you can have one isolated agent working per feature branch, all in the same terminal window.
I originally built it to power the development of my personal finance app, Whisper Money, and I’d love for you to check it out over at victor-falcon/falcode on GitHub!
PHP
📚 Navigating the Web with a Smile: A Jovial Guide to Simple PHP Routing
Ahoy, fellow web explorers! Have you ever wondered how websites find their way around the vast internet, guiding you seamlessly from one page to another? It’s all thanks to a trusty navigator called “routing.” But fret not, because in this cheerful journey, we’re going to unravel the magic of simple PHP routing, why it’s essential, and how you can steer your web ship with joy.
📚 Write Faster PHP Code: Retracing Brent’s Steps
In this Tideways video, Brent’s blog post on writing faster PHP is put to the test with real profiling data.
📚 8 Code Quality Tools To Use In Your Long-Term PHP Applications
Over the years, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of not-so-known code quality tools and ways that can help me improve my own code and keep it maintainable, which is very hard, especially when the project grows in terms of business complexity after years of it being developed. Here’s a list of code quality tools and ways that I would recommend to people to use in order for them to become better software engineers as well as keep their code maintainable, and write less buggy code.
📚 Building an Order System with Multiple Products in PHP
This is the second part of my “From Procedural to OO” series. In the first article, I refactored procedural PHP into OO using Strategy, Factory, and Repository patterns. Now I’m taking the next step: building an Order system that handles multiple products.
📚 Detecting and Replacing Stale Video Content Automatically
Videos disappear from the internet constantly. They get deleted, marked private, or copyright-struck. If you run a video curation platform, stale content is your enemy. Here’s the automated detection and replacement system I built for ViralVidVault.
📚 Building a Scalable File Storage System Using S3
Recently, I implemented a file storage solution using an S3-compatible service as the backend for a web application’s file server. The main goal was to replace local file storage with a scalable and distributed storage solution, improving availability, security, and file management.
📚 Four Ways to Trigger Delete Row from a Table
Every delete must: Open confirmation modal, Wait for user confirmation, Then trigger DELETE request. We are only discussing how the front end triggers the route.
📚 Basic Load Balancing for a Web System on DigitalOcean
In this article we’ll build a simple and inexpensive load-balanced web setup on DigitalOcean.
📚 Make your server-rendered website feel like an SPA — with 5KB of JavaScript
You’ve built a server-rendered website. PHP, Python, Ruby, Go — doesn’t matter. It works. It’s fast. It’s SEO-friendly. But every link click triggers a full page reload. The browser flashes white. The scroll position resets. Users notice. The usual answer is: “rewrite everything in React.” That’s overkill. There’s a lighter path.
📚 Stop Catching Exceptions Everywhere in PHP — Use These Patterns Instead
Many developers learn to use exceptions in PHP and immediately start wrapping every method in try–catch blocks.
📚 The End of “Fat Controllers”: How and Why You Should Implement a Service Layer in PHP
A practical guide from hard-to-maintain “spaghetti code” to clean and testable architecture. See how one simple change can make your life easier.
📚 Simplified Native PHP Relations Example
In the last article, we discussed why Native PHP is still relevant in 2026 and how it gives developers complete control. Today, let’s take it a step further: how to implement database relationships in Native PHP, without the magic of frameworks.
📚 Working Together on the Future of PHP
I’m incredibly excited to be joining the PHP Foundation as the Executive Director and continuing the work that has been done under the leadership of Roman Pronskiy and the Board. For those who don’t know me, I look forward to meeting you!
📚 NativePHP vs Native PHP: Clearing the Confusion
Here’s a well-structured article you can use about the common confusion between NativePHP (the framework) and “native PHP”,
I sometimes get weird looks when I tell programmers my main language is PHP. They wonder why I would choose PHP over other languages. The answer is simple: I think of PHP as a tool, just like any other language, framework, or technology; and it’s a tool I know well. I know what it’s good at; I know its limitations; I know when to and when not to use it.
📚 Vibe Coding Will Make You Feel Like a God. Then It Won’t.
I’m a PHP backend developer. For years I had this quiet frustration: I could build anything on the web, but I’d never built software. A real app. Something you install, something that runs on your phone, something that isn’t just a response to an HTTP request.
📚 Enhancing Security Audits: Avoiding False Positives in File Path Detection
In the devlog-ist/landing project, we’re continually working to improve our security posture. A recent focus has been on refining our security auditing tools to reduce false positives, particularly around the detection of potentially sensitive file paths.
Times are changing. Developers are changing. Artisans are changing. But the core of what makes a great artisan? That stays the same, it just got amplified.
📚 What If SSR, Hydration, and Remote Caching Are Just Workarounds?
This article documents 16 specific examples — with links to source code, GitHub issues, official documentation, and real error messages — where the Node.js/JS ecosystem creates problems that don’t exist in PHP, Go, Elixir, Python, Ruby, Java, or .NET, and then sells you the workaround.
I come from a time before PHP existed. Some of you do as well. It’s likely why I opposed the notion of a CMS. Because I felt like I didn’t need one. People like me eventually conceded to the idea of easy image uploads with thumbnail previews and all the niceties brought on by “Ajax”, etc.
Laravel
📚 The Ultimate Laravel + Inertia Localization Showdown: Why laravel-lang-sync-inertia Beats the Giants
For years, developers have defaulted to the “industry standard” packages. But as Inertia.js has evolved, these legacy giants are starting to show their age. They are often bloated, framework-locked, or require frustrating build-step configurations.
📚 Introduction to Eloquent ORM in Laravel
When developers start learning Laravel, one of the first things they hear about is Eloquent ORM. And for good reason. Eloquent is one of the features that makes Laravel extremely developer-friendly. Instead of writing complex SQL queries, you can interact with your database using simple and expressive PHP code.
📚 Speed up your Livewire tests
I’d been having very slow Livewire tests in my application but hadn’t put much stock into it until I started work on the app again and was running the suite often.
📚 static $variable in PHP: a silent trap with Laravel Octane
When working with Laravel without Octane, some coding habits seem harmless. But as soon as you switch to Octane, they can cause bugs that are hard to reproduce and even harder to debug in production.
📚 I Built 6 Authentication Methods for My Laravel SaaS - Here’s the Full Architecture
Every SaaS project starts with authentication. And every time, developers face the same choice: use a starter kit and outgrow it in a month, or build from scratch and spend weeks on something that isn’t your core product.
📚 How I Structure Every Laravel REST API Project
Every time I start a new Laravel API project, I used to spend half a day on the same setup.
📚 The Laravel Community Mobile App Helps You Discover Events and Connect With Developers
Laravel continues to grow with meetups, conferences, and community events happening all around the world. Keeping track of everything can be difficult as more local groups and regional events appear each year.
Inertia v3 beta is a major pre-release milestone that ships a built-in XHR HTTP client, a new useHttp hook for standalone HTTP requests, optimistic updates across the router and form APIs, instant visits, and more.
📚 Polyscope Is an Ai-First Dev Environment for Orchestrating Agents
The team at Beyond Code has announced Polyscope, a free agent orchestration tool designed to run multiple AI agents at the same time.
Symfony
📚 Add Filters to Your Symfony API in 3 Minutes Flat
Stop writing the same filter for every endpoint. There’s a better way.
📚 Symfony 8.0.7, 7.4.7 & 6.4.35 Released
Symfony 8.0.7, 7.4.7 & 6.4.35 has just been released. Read the Symfony upgrade guide to learn more about upgrading Symfony and use the SymfonyInsight upgrade reports to detect the code you will need to change in your project.
📚 March 2–8, 2026 - A Week of Symfony #1001
This week, Symfony 6.4.35, 7.4.7, and 8.0.7 maintenance versions were released. In addition, we introduced featured listings for Symfony job postings. Lastly, we published AI skills for Symfony UX.