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! 🎄🎁

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.

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.

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.

Adam and Jerod talk with Sara Golemon about her work at Facebook, The PHP Language Specification, and making PHP awesome.