Eight months ago, in 🎧 episode 49, Alex Sims (Solutions Architect & Senior Software Engineer at James & James) shared with us his ambition to help migrate a monolithic PHP app running on AWS EC2 to a more modern architecture. The idea was some serverless, some EKS, and many incremental improvements.

So how did all of this work out in practice? How did the improved system cope with the Black Friday peak, as well as all the following Christmas orders? Thank you Alex for sharing with us your Ship It! inspired Kaizen story. It’s a wonderful Christmas present! 🎄🎁

I have to admit, I enjoy making fun of PHP. Mostly because the language itself is a fractal of bad design. But I (try to) do it with love, because language design is just one part of what makes a programming environment good. This post is a nice reminder of the many reasons why PHP and JavaScript are awesome.

Over the last twenty years, I have used over a dozen languages professionally, from C to Common Lisp, from Java to Python, from C++ to Typescript.

Yet, I love janky programming languages. In particular, I really enjoy PHP and JavaScript.

Here’s why.

I particularly agree with the point at the end about legacy codebases, many of which are powered by PHP and JS:

A legacy codebase means that the product is performing well. It means that I can often make immediate and impactful improvements.

For me, nothing comes close to the pleasure of improving a product with many users.

Laravel Pint is a zero-dependency PHP code style fixer for minimalists - built on top of PHP-CS-Fixer. Pint makes it simple to ensure that your code style stays clean and consistent.

Can Go help you write faster PHP apps? In this episode, we explore the unusual pairing of Go and PHP that led to the RoadRunner project, a high-performance PHP application server, load-balancer, and process manager that is all written in Go.

RSS-Bridge is a PHP project capable of generating RSS and Atom feeds for websites that don’t have one. It can be used on webservers or as a stand-alone application in CLI mode.

I made a very poor-man’s version of this as my first ever Sinatra app way back in the day. It’s cool to see that vision live on, but it sucks that tools like this have to exist. It seems that the author agrees with me on that:

We want to share with friends, using open protocols: RSS, Atom, XMPP, whatever. Because no one wants to have your service with your applications using your API force-feeding them. Friends must be free to choose whatever software and service they want.

We are rebuilding bridges you have willfully destroyed.

Richard MacManus answers a couple of his own questions after the announcement of the newly formed PHP Foundation:

Why is PHP still such a critical part of the web, when other programming languages and frameworks are seemingly more suited to the modern web? Second, what are the motivations behind the companies that have formed this new foundation?

Did you know almost half of the top 10,000 websites on the internet use PHP?! That’s quite the footprint. I’m happy to hear PHP is still alive, kickin’, and continuing to evolve. The more tools we have to build awesome websites with, the better.

Anyone on the inside know why they didn’t shift to GitHub years ago?

We don’t yet know how exactly this happened, but everything points towards a compromise of the git.php.net server (rather than a compromise of an individual git account).

While investigation is still underway, we have decided that maintaining our own git infrastructure is an unnecessary security risk, and that we will discontinue the git.php.net server. Instead, the repositories on GitHub, which were previously only mirrors, will become canonical.

The memo points to the two malicious commits.

helps you to quickly provision WordPress with SQLite and serve the site using PHP’s builtin webserver. No external WebServer like Apache or Nginx and Database Server like MySQL or MariaDB is required. WPSQLite can give you a completely portable installation of WordPress which you can install even in your pendrive and run on *nix based operating systems, or even on Windows.

This looks like a great option for getting a WP dev environment bootstrapped without much hassle. I didn’t even know you could run WordPress on SQLite…

Expose is a beautiful, open source, tunnel application that allows you to share your local websites with others via the internet.

Since you can host the server yourself, you have full control over the domains that your shared sites will be available at. You can extend expose with additional features and middleware classes on the server and client side, to make it suit your specific needs.

Alan Shreve closed ngrok’s source code years ago, and every now-and-again an open source alternative pops on the scene. Add Expose to the list. It’s written in PHP and has a nice shine on it. But which of these SSH tunneling tools is best in class?

This is a pretty awesome visual timeline of the 25 year history of PHP from JetBrains.

The dashboard consists of tiles which are, under the hood, Livewire components. They can update themselves via polling.

You can use any of the pre-packaged tiles or create your own.

Linkalot’s highlights:

• Instantly save links in a link list using the accompanying bookmarklet.
• Add a short description to a link. The description appears as a pop-up on hover.
• All links are saved in a plain text file.
• Password-protected editing area for managing the saved links.

Demo here.

Ignition offers you a beautiful, customizable error page. It also allows you to share your errors to Flare publicly. If configured with a valid Flare API key, it will send errors to a project in your Flare account.

By giving Pipe Dream a minimum of input in form of a sketch/entity list it will predict your application schema and feed it into a set of pipes. These pipes will generate all the files needed to get started really quick.

See Pipe Dream in action on this 2-minute intro video.

Drop-in Pusher replacement, SSL support, Laravel Echo support and a debug dashboard are just some of its features.

This looks really well done. The Laravel community is en fuego as of late. 🔥

Adam and Jerod talk with Angie Byron, a core contributor and staple of the Drupal community. We haven’t covered Drupal really (sorry about that), but the call with Angie was inspiring! From the background, to the tech, the usage of the software, the communication at all levels of the community — Drupal is doing something SO RIGHT, and we’re happy to celebrate with them as they march on to the “Framelication” beat of their own drum.

Telescope provides insight into the requests coming into your application, exceptions, log entries, database queries, queued jobs, mail, notifications, cache operations, scheduled tasks, variable dumps and more.

Half my kingdom for a Telescope port to Rails and Phoenix/Plug.

A fully automatic, framework-independent, RESTful PHP router component used in Scrawler

RoadRunner is an open source (MIT licensed), high-performance PHP application server, load balancer and process manager. It supports running as a service with the ability to extend its functionality on a per-project basis.

RoadRunner is written in Go, and can be used to replace the class Nginx+FPM setup, boasting “much greater performance”. I’d love to see some benchmarks. Better yet, I’d love to see someone use this in production for a bit and write up their experience.

This looks like a super useful package for anyone running/operating a Laravel app.

PuPHPeteer supports the entire Puppeteer API. The README has a few examples where Pupeteer’s documentation has been adapted to PHP syntax.

Have a bunch of web projects on your local development computer, nestled in your ~/Sites (or other-OS equivalent)? Just need a simple way to enumerate them as links so you don’t have to keep track of them as they get created/removed? OK with PHP? Localhost Index has your back.

Build custom admin panels 10x faster. Backpack will help you generate CRUDs for your Eloquent models, and easily create custom CRUDs for complex use cases.

To be clear, this is not a CMS. It’s a framework to build your own CMS for your Laravel projects.

Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress and the CEO of Automattic, joined the show to talk about the past, present, and future of WordPress. We talked about the role of JavaScript for WordPress, their new REST API, Calypso, and more.

Ben Word and Scott Walkinshaw joined the show to talk about a more modern WordPress stack, Bedrock and Sage, dependency management, WordPress deployment, smarter development setup with tools like Ansible and Vagrant, and more.

If you’re someone who wants to use WordPress in more modern ways, this show is for you.