Shocm's Blog

A hands-on guide to feature flags with Laravel Pennant covering scopes, rich values, gradual rollouts with Lottery, testing, and cleanup in production.

Composer 2.10 adds native malware blocking and a unified config.policy framework for PHP supply chain security.

How MySQL composite indexes really work, why column order decides everything, and how covering indexes skip table lookups entirely for PHP developers.

A clear look at PHP's True Async RFC, the spawn and await coroutine model, why version 1.6 was voted down, and where native async is heading for PHP 8.6.

Laravel 13 lets you declare Eloquent config like fillable, hidden, and table with native PHP attributes.

The PHP Foundation's new Ecosystem Security Team scanned 300+ Composer packages in its first month.

NativePHP Mobile v3 (Air) is free, MIT-licensed, and built on a modular plugin system.

Symfony AI is nearing 1.0 with components for agents, tools, and one unified API across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini.

Laravel's Interruptible interface lets queued jobs catch SIGTERM during deploys, so long-running work can stop loops, release locks, and save state cleanly.

Laravel Wayfinder's next beta generates typed TypeScript from your PHP for routes, models, enums, Inertia props, and broadcasts.

PHP's Bound-Erased Generic Types RFC brings native generic syntax to PHP 8.6.

Laravel 13.16 ships a php artisan dev command that runs your server, queue, logs, and Vite together.

A practical guide to wiring up nvim-dap with Xdebug 3 so you can set breakpoints and step through PHP code without ever leaving NeoVim.

Generated columns and functional indexes let MySQL index expressions, JSON paths, and case-insensitive lookups that would otherwise force a full table scan.

Symfony 7.4 is the new LTS, bringing invokable command upgrades, decoupled controllers, UUID v7 by default, and a caching HTTP client.

Alpine's Sort plugin gives you Kanban-style drag-and-drop in a few attributes.

blink.cmp is the batteries-included NeoVim completion plugin replacing nvim-cmp.

PHP 8.6's partial function application lets you pre-fill arguments with a ?

Laravel Boost feeds Claude Code and Cursor version-aware guidelines, on-demand skills, and 17,000+ docs so they write idiomatic Laravel instead of generic PHP.

Filament v4 is now at 4.11 with faster table rendering, a TipTap editor, nested resources, and dead-simple MFA.

Pest 4 brings Playwright-powered browser testing to PHP with the visit() helper, smoke tests, visual regression, and parallel sharding.

PHPUnit 13 adds sealed test doubles, eight precise array assertions, and a true withConsecutive() replacement.

Laravel 13 ships first-party JSON:API resources.

MySQL 9.7 LTS ships the Hypergraph Optimizer, free enterprise replication tools, JSON Duality Views DML, and officially ends MySQL 8.0 support.

Livewire 4 ships single-file components, islands, lazy/defer bundling, wire:sort, optimistic UI, and seven security hardening fixes.

PHPverse 2026 is a free online PHP conference on June 9 with Jeffrey Way, Fabien Potencier, Larry Garfield, and more.

The PHP Foundation's 2025 impact report reveals 2,929 commits, a new Ecosystem Security Team funded by Alpha-Omega, and bold goals for 2026.

Laravel Reverb is the first-party WebSocket server built for Laravel.

Tinkerwell 5 ships an MCP server that gives Claude and Cursor direct PHP execution in your project context.

Symfony 8.1 ships HTTP-less app support, a standalone ConsoleBundle, method-based commands, and the new #[RateLimit] attribute.

Practical Claude Code tips for PHP developers: CLAUDE.md setup, custom agents for Laravel/Symfony, skill libraries, and MCP-powered workflows.

PHP 8.5 adds clone with syntax to update readonly properties while cloning.

PHP 8.5's pipe operator (|>) enables clean left-to-right function chaining.

NeoVim 0.11 and 0.12 dramatically simplified PHP LSP setup.

Laravel 13's first-party AI SDK brings provider-agnostic text, image, audio, and embedding generation to PHP developers with a clean, familiar API.

Composer 2.9 and 2.10 bring automatic security blocking, a new repo CLI command, and malware filtering.

NativePHP Air goes free and open source with a modular plugin system.

PHP 8.5's #[NoDiscard] attribute warns you when critical return values are silently discarded.

Laravel Pennant makes feature flags a first-class citizen in your app.

MySQL window functions let the database do ranking, running totals, and row comparisons that most PHP devs still handle in application code.

Learn how to expose your Laravel application to AI agents using the official laravel/mcp package — tools, resources, and prompts in minutes.

Symfony's new Tui component brings CSS-like styling, widget toolkits, and PHP Fibers to terminal UI development in pure PHP 8.4+.

Laravel Herd now ships with a built-in MCP server that connects AI clients like Claude to your local PHP environment with 218 tools.

Laravel Nightwatch delivers production-grade observability for Laravel apps with zero-config setup, deep telemetry, and real-time alerting.

Tempest 3.0 is the forward-thinking PHP framework requiring PHP 8.5, with a new exception handler, faster ORM, and a discovery system that removes boilerplate.

Laravel 13.6 adds native debounceable queued jobs.

Master AlpineJS state management with $store, $persist, and $dispatch.

Elizabeth Barron joins as Executive Director, Matt Stauffer lands on the board—here's how the PHP Foundation's bold 2026 moves shape PHP's future.

Livewire 4 ships Islands, native View Transitions, parallel requests, and single-file components — here's what changes and how to migrate.

PHP 8.6 lands two closure optimizations — static inference and stateless caching — delivering real memory and speed gains with zero code changes required.