🥧 The PHP Installer for Extensions

Removes 20+ patterns of AI slop from any piece of writing.

Everyday I get a few emails asking about the specifics of some piece of software or hardware I use. I change up things fairly often, so this page will serve as a living document and a place to point curious developers to when I get asked. If there is something missing leave a co…

AI companies are causing a content drought that will eventually starve them. In a recent article, The Economist didn’t mince words: “AI is killing the web.” Published last month, the piece raises urgent questions about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the internet as we …

For a long time, the visitors to our websites were people. That is slowly changing. More and more, the “visitor” is a piece of software, such as an AI assistant, a bot, or an agent doing a task for someone. It might be trying to…

by Yitzchak Schaffer (@yitznewton) One of Uncle Bob’s pieces of advice in Clean Code, is to protect the boundaries of your codebase from change. In practical terms, this means insulating the use of third-party libraries in your codebase by wrapping them in an adapter inter…

Early 2025, my oldest daughter came home from school and had learned to play chess. She was so excited about the game that she even asked a board as her birthday gift. I, on the other hand, had never played chess and didn’t even know how the pieces moved. Trying to encoura…

Writing doesn’t necessarily always come naturally to me. It often takes me days, weeks or even months of toying with an idea, before I think it’s mature enough to put it down into writing. I can’t afford that luxury this time though, I wouldn’t think of m…

Let’s (no pun intended) look at a set of response times of a web service. let responseTimes = [ 18.0; 21.0; 41.0; 42.0; 48.0; 50.0; 55.0; 90.0; ] People like having a single number to summarize a piece of data. The average is the most popular candidate. The average is calc…

Comments shouldn't explain what a piece of code is doing, but why it is doing it.

I keep searching for the piece that will unlock everything, even though I know it doesn't exist.

I've recently transformed my Statamic powered site into a statically hosted version, mostly because services like Netlify and Firebase offer free hosting for static files, which means I don't need to manage and pay for my own server. The only dynamic piece that was missing was a…

A few days ago Fabrice Bellard released QuickJS, a small JS engine that targets embedded systems. Curious to give it a try, I downloaded and set it up on my system to try and understand this incredible piece of software. Installation Setting up QuickJS is dead simple: clone one …

Update: we’ve decided to move our blog under our official website; we’ve republished this post at this url.A couple of days ago, the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG) approved the PSR-18 “HTTP Client” standard. This standard was the last missing piece to build appli…

In an ideal world, users would scan through your entire page to find the very piece of information they’re looking for, but research shows this is not the case. Usability tests prove that people tend to choose the first somewhat reasonable choice that catches their eyes. T…

Recently, I listened to Lex Friedman's [podcast with Pieter Levels](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6KBpL2XfR9VdojbKNpE7cX). Pieter talked about his technology stack for building startups: vanilla PHP, jQuery, and SQLite. Hype is exciting, but there is no better technology proo…

One of the main concerns with using LEGO to build enclosures for the nodes is safety. Raspberry Pies can get hot, and no one wants things to go ablaze. So I, after a few iterations, designed the enclosures with plenty of room for moving air around and through the nodes. And in t…

Force fully recreating a TerraForm resource is usually ill-advised, however, in some very specific situations this might exactly what you want. In my TerraForm set up I have two of such situations. One piece of software somehow stops working when no configuration is deployed, an…

He-hey! You just opened this page to say that there is no such thing as unit testing with database. Unit tests are supposed to test isolated pieces, and sure unit tests should not touch the database. And we can agree with that. But it happened that “unit test” term is far more p…

Serialisation, or serialization, is a process that takes in a piece of data and generates a storable or transportable representation of the data. The serialised representation of data can be achieved with various formats. JSON is very common as most languages have some form of J…

Paragon Initiative Enterprises answers several reader questions

Slice of PIE is a new mini-series

Our company's name was decided on March 14, 2015, which makes its birthday very easy to remember.

Introducing PIE-Hosted Services to Help Further our Goals to Secure the Entire PHP Ecosystem

Listen, Bill, you don't know me, but I used to be a big fan. That ended some time ago, of course, but it's still something I used to be. I will admit that I haven't read your latest piece about your new approach to climate change, but I want to you know that some fascist idiots …

I wrote a piece on the Spatie blog about the place packages/library have in the ecosystem when first-party code is cheaper than ever with AI. Scrolling to the end: The question before every composer require is no longer “is there a package for this?” Almost certainly…

Today I finally upgraded my scotch pancake compilation method. Take a pancake, spread plenty of peanut butter on the top, carefully push blueberry pieces everywhere and cover with another pancake. I call it the love sandwich, because I love it. Today I had brilliant conversation…

Recently I found myself maintaining an interesting piece of code. It is a sequence of Symfony Commands to do some calculation and publish the results. It was a sequence of around 8 commands doing each one its part of the process, all independent of each other but also dependent …

Pie, new extension installer for #PHP was released! Let’s have a look at it and see what it brings to the table.

Executive Summary PHP turned 30 in 2025. With The PHP Foundation's support, the PHP project marked the year by shipping PHP 8.5. The PHP Foundation also launched PIE 1.0, initiated a project to modernize PHP's stream layer, and authored roughly 42% of all commits to PHP's core. …

An excellent short documentation about the developers behind Ableton, the legendary creators of Ableton Live and Push. Without doubt, Live is one of the most influential pieces of software ever made in the context of music production / arrangement, used nearly everywhere. This v…

Excellent, essential and game-changing talk by Ilya Grigorik and Pierre Far (both of Google), explaining why you should always use HTTPS, not only on “security-related requests”. The talk also features prices and sources of certificates, have a look on the free ones …

I could ask the same about any other closed source AI firm, but Anthropic seems to be the most popular at the moment. I'm very curious what their next step will be, because open source models like DeepSeek are already taking bites out of their pie. It looks like AI assisted codi…

I get asked, from time to time, what things I would recommend when visiting Vermont. Here’s my list. I’ll update it as I learn about new gems. Hill Farmstead Brewery Parker Pie (near HF) for pizza / bottles; they have a great tap list Willy’s Store in Greensbor…

I think this is the first piece I’ve written on my blog that is tagged only “beer”; apologies to my readers who don’t care about such things (there are feeds for PHP and Web as well, if you’d prefer to avoid the occasional post on beer geekery). I l…

Bert De Swaef shows how PHP attributes made his Livewire components easier to read by attaching validation, URL sync, and event listeners directly to the properties and methods they belong to. Nice piece on how attributes reduce mental overhead, improve IDE support, and make com…

A practical take on multi-agent setups in Laravel: another agent only earns its place when it needs its own model, tools, or instructions. Good piece on delegation tradeoffs, context handoff, and how to test routing before it becomes an expensive latency tax. Read more

My first real adventure into the embedded world has been porting the TSIC temperature sensor code from arduino to Rust. While the code seems to work fine for my use case, there are some pieces in the code which I ported from C but always scratched my head about. I neither owned …

Yesterday I wrote about Standalone Forms and Validation. It may need a little bit knowledge on how the Aura.Filter works. But that is a good start if you want to know how you can integrate the pieces of Aura. Today I think I need to show you the very minimal approach you can tak…

If there is one moment I’ll never forget, it was the little box hovering a few feet in the air. When my girlfriend walked in, she thought it was a clever piece of art, made to look as though held up by some wires…

Today marks ReactPHP's 9th birthday. 🎉 And with today's release of the new default loop, using ReactPHP has never been easier! Let's celebrate with a big birthday party to ensure you will also get a big piece of the birthday cake to taste. 🍰 We're releasing a new version…

Alex \"Pierstoval\" Rock

Pierre Joye

Pierre Joye

Pierre Joye

Pierre

Pierre

Alex \"Pierstoval\" Rock

Alex \"Pierstoval\" Rock

Pierre Joye

Pierre Joye

Pierre Joye

Pierre Joye

One of the most common pieces of feedback we hear from the PHP community is that the newcomer experience could use some improvement, and that we may be losing new users because of it. This is something that we as a community can address, and it's why The PHP Foundation made it p…

Contributed by Fabien Potencier The sandbox has been part of Twig since 2009. If your users write newsletters, CMS blocks or email themes, the sandbox is the piece that keeps their creativity away from your application internals. For seventeen years, it has done that job as an e…