Named Arguments in PHP 8 Practice
Named arguments let you skip optional parameters and document the call site. htmlspecialchars($s, double_encode: false) reads better than five positional true/false arguments.They …
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First-Class Callable Syntax
PHP 8.1 introduced strtoupper(...) — a syntactically clean way to reference a function as a callable. Same for methods: $user->email(...).It replaces the older string-or-array c…
Read article →Composer 2 Is Worth the Upgrade
Composer 2 rewrote the solver. Typical installs are 50–80% faster and use a fraction of the memory of Composer 1. Lock files generated by Composer…
Read article →PHPStan Level 9 Is Achievable
Level 9 of PHPStan flags the use of mixed — every variable must have a known type. It is a large jump from level 8…
Read article →Pest Is the Modern PHP Test Runner
Pest wraps PHPUnit with an expressive, function-based syntax. test('it sums numbers', fn() => expect(1 + 1)->toBe(2)); reads like documentation.Existing PHPUnit tests continu…
Read article →Laravel Octane Keeps Workers Hot
Octane runs a Laravel application inside a persistent worker — FrankenPHP, RoadRunner, or Swoole — so the framework boots once instead of every request.Typical request…
Read article →OPcache Tuning for Production
OPcache stores compiled bytecode in shared memory. opcache.memory_consumption (256MB on busy sites) and opcache.max_accelerated_files (20,000 for big apps) are the first knobs to t…
Read article →PHP JIT in 2026: Where It Helps
PHP's JIT (added in 8.0) compiles hot code paths to native machine code. For typical web requests the win is small — the request cycle…
Read article →PDO Best Practices for 2026
Set PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE to PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION. Set PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES to false so the database (not PHP) does the prepare. Set PDO::ATTR_DEFAULT_FETCH_MODE to PDO::FETCH_…
Read article →PHP-FPM Tuning Without Guesswork
Choose pm.dynamic for moderate sites and pm.static for high-traffic sites where you have measured the memory cost per worker.Calculate pm.max_children as (available RAM × 0.7)…
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