August 29, 2026

Stop Repeating Yourself in Code Review: Build a Custom Mago Lint Rule

Check out my video on "Stop Repeating Yourself in Code Review: Build a Custom Mago Lint Rule" at the php[architect] YouTube Channel. https://youtu.be/Sns4iMSa3qA

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August 28, 2026

Your Memory Is Not a System

A few years back I pushed a release to production and broke the whole site for about twenty minutes. The code was fine, and the tests passed. The problem was that our deploy had a specific order to...

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August 24, 2026

Weekly Digest - August 24, 2026

Happy Monday All! On August 17th GitHub went down for almost eight hours and took a ton of services out with it. The root cause was that the load balancers saturated, and Copilot's retry loops...

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August 21, 2026

Your Side Project Doesn't Need to Be Perfect to Ship

When I started building Unleashed Podcasts, I hardcoded a bunch of stuff that had no business being hardcoded. Values like XP for publishing an episode, streak rules, and the list of episode statuses...

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August 20, 2026

PHP 8.5 + 8.6 Release Manager Daniel Scherzer

Check out my video on "PHP 8.5 + 8.6 Release Manager Daniel Scherzer" at the php[architect] YouTube Channel. https://youtu.be/fBkBBAy_ous Find more episodes on our Introducing the Community...

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August 19, 2026

GitHub Goes Down for 8 Hours, and Your Whole Team Stoped. Here's My Fix.

Like most of you, on August 17th I sat down to review the code that my team had pushed to GitHub. I opened GitHub in a browser to see the Unicorn letting me know there was a problem. Occasionally,...

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August 17, 2026

Weekly Digest - August 17, 2026

Three posts this week: a way to make an AI agent fix its own duplicated code, a deep look at how PHP's loose comparisons can hand attackers a login, and the email templates I use to book podcast...

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August 15, 2026

I Made My AI Agent Fix Its Own Copy-Paste (jscpd + Mago)

Check out my video on "I Made My AI Agent Fix Its Own Copy-Paste (jscpd + Mago)" at the php[architect] YouTube Channel. https://youtu.be/ubhVleOpLQ0

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August 14, 2026

The Complete Guide to PHP Type Juggling and Comparison Gotchas

Years ago I inherited a login system that checked passwords with something close to this: Most of the time it worked, but occasionally a user reported they could log in with the wrong password,...

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August 10, 2026

Weekly Digest - August 10, 2026

Three posts this week. One PHP function I wasted years reinventing, a podcast about spotting duplicated code, and a system for finding podcast guests when your show is small. I spent years writing...

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