Blog

May 6, 2026 · Scott Keck-Warren

Token-Oriented Object Notation (TOON) For PHP Developers

See the video version at https://youtu.be/Nk9ayWxkJ1M It's an unfortunate piece of our current developer reality that a...

Apr 21, 2026 · Scott Keck-Warren

Ubuntu Firewall Setup in Less Than 5 Minutes (Plus One Step That Will Lock You Out)

Setting up a Virtual Private Server (VPS) without a firewall is asking for trouble. Ideally, you'd have a dedicated se...

Feb 27, 2026 · Scott Keck-Warren

Advanced Unique Index Patterns for Soft Deletes (MySQL and PostgreSQL)

Tell me if this has ever happened to you: a user contacts support because they're randomly seeing different order hist...

Jan 30, 2026 · Scott Keck-Warren

Here's Why FrankenPHP Worker Mode Saves Your Sanity

A lot of developers spend little to no time thinking about how our code gets from being code to something that can be...

Jan 19, 2026 · Scott Keck-Warren

Database Views: The PHP Feature Nobody Uses (But SHOULD)

One of the more challenging pieces of maintaining applications that uses an SQL database is the fact that queries only...

Dec 18, 2025 · Scott Keck-Warren

Why Your PHP Dates Keep Breaking (And How to Fix It)

If you've ever spent hours debugging a date-related bug only to discover that some code somewhere modified a DateTime...

Dec 7, 2025 · Scott Keck-Warren

Relational Databases Made Simple

If you're building web apps with PHP, you are almost certainly using a relational database, even if you call it "MySQL...

Nov 15, 2025 · Scott Keck-Warren

The Secret Header That Makes Your PHP App 10x More Secure

As developers in the year 2025, keeping our systems and applications secure is of the utmost importance. One of the mo...

Oct 22, 2025 · Scott Keck-Warren

Stop Manual Refactoring: Automate Your PHP Upgrades with Rector

One of the more challenging parts of coding is making sure we're constantly refactoring our code to make it easier to...

Oct 2, 2025 · Scott Keck-Warren

What’s New in PHP 8.5? (Release Date + Must-Know Features)

At the time of this writing, PHP 8.5 is in the release candidate cycle, so we can finally start to discuss what's new...

Sep 19, 2025 · John Congdon

Real-Time Call Transcription with FreeSWITCH and AssemblyAI: A Debugging Journey

Recently, I dove headfirst into adding real-time audio transcription to a FreeSWITCH-based system. The idea was simple:...

Sep 15, 2025

PHPStan: Your Development Best Friend Who Actually Knows PHP Better Than You Do

It's 2 AM, you're three coffees deep, and you just pushed what you're convinced is the cleanest code you've ever written...

Sep 8, 2025 · Scott Keck-Warren

Stop Repeating Yourself in Laravel: Custom Artisan Commands Explained

It all started with a simple annoyance. I was working on a Laravel project and kept having to run the same set of com...

Sep 2, 2025

PHP Security in 2025: Lessons from the Core Security Audit

Picture this: You're responsible for a piece of software that powers nearly three-quarters of all websites on the intern...