I'm speaking at Longhorn PHP this October! 🎉 "How Tetris Made Me a Better Programmer" — Tetris has a real, published 60-page spec (the Tetris Guideline): an eight-phase state machine, 7-bag randomizer, SRS wall kicks, T-spin detection. I built the whole thing in PHP from the spec — it's where fat-enums was born — and it taught me more about state machines and specifications than most jobs have. Austin, Oct 15–16. Blind Bird pricing through Aug 8: longhornphp.com/schedule

Longhorn PHP

This Week in PHP Internals — August 5

The 35-ballot deprecation vote closes Monday: list() is DEADLOCKED 21-21, let sits at exactly 2/3 (22-11), dechunk 17-15, _() failing 9-20. Function autoloading went to a vote and its author pulled it a day later over the intent-to-vote rule (it stood 2-11). Literal scalar types won't reopen — the real freeze line is the beta-1 tag, Aug 11. Time\Duration is officially in at 35-1 with full method names (multiplyBy, divideBy) winning 30-2, and minimum versions passed both ballots. Pipe assignment (|>=) is still short of 2/3 at 12-10-6 with a week left; readonly defaults (22-0) and const object writes (14-2) close this weekend. Plus: curl_setopt vs. your secrets, "did you mean define?" errors, and monomorphized generics evangelism.

Full rundown: youtu.be/8YUc-A2h-f4

This week's episode is supported by Tideways - profiling, tracing & monitoring built for PHP: from slow request to root cause in minutes. Free trial, 5-minute setup, no credit card: tideways.com

Tideways

This Week in PHP Internals — July 29 (recorded at Laracon US!)

42 RFC ballots open at once. The 35-ballot deprecation vote has list() LOSING 17-19, _() failing 6-18, and dechunk split 15-13. Caleb White's pipe assignment operator (|>=) split its vote 8-8-3. Readonly defaults (17-0) and const object property writes (11-2) are clear. Time\Duration closes Friday at 33-1 with full method names winning 28-2. And the literal scalar types vote lasted exactly 18 minutes before its own author retracted it over process rules — it reopens tomorrow.

Full rundown: youtu.be/Af_8W6wxx6k

This Week in PHP Internals — July 22, 2026

PHP's first RFC ballots of the season are open, and both are lopsided: Time\Duration stands 23–1 (with full method names winning the naming vote 18–1), and minimum supported versions is running 20–3 and 21–0. Both close before the 8.6 freeze.

Also this week: gd 2.4 arrived 4 days after the RFC cutoff and collided with the release calendar. Pipe assignment |>= now has two RFCs claiming the same token. Typed arrays got proposed, revised, and shelved inside 5 days. Serializable closures hit v0.3 — reflection out, serialize() in. And the deprecations vote — list() included — opens Monday.

Full 17-minute rundown, with links to every thread: youtu.be/tCUKb5rPuJ4

Today I acquired 4.5 million shares in Artisan Build, Inc.

AMA