These are my raw notes from PHP Tek/JS 2026 Day 2.

The Activated Leader - Leading Through Technical Transitions When Everything Is Changing - Lilah Jones

• "Sometimes it takes courage to eat breakfast"
• Framework to manage change?
• "You already know what to do. the gap isn't knowledge it's courage"
• The 4 Phases of Activation
  • Find the core issue
  • Take courageos Action
  • Navigate the in-between
  • Accelerate What's possible
• Challenge I'm facing
• It's difficult to do good work when there's no physcological safety
• Take resident action
• North Star - If money wasn't a problem what would you being doing
• FORM
  • Family
  • Ocupaion
  • Recreation
  • Motivation

The State of Native PHP - Shane Rosethal

• NativePHP - real native mobile and desktop applications
• Super Native
  • Full native rendering
  • No WebView Required
• PHP interacts with native UI elements through tailwind CSS classes
• Native UI

What Online Dating Taught Me about Algorithms - Diana Pham

Supercharge your PHP apps with Go-powered PHP extensions Alexandre Daubois

Demystifying Regular Expressions- Steve Grunwell

• https://regexr.com/
• lowercase match -> uppercase NOT2026-05-21-advanced-sql-the-features-you’ve-been-ignoring-but-shouldnt-php-js-tek-2026.md
• //i -> insisitive
• //g -> global but doesn't work in php
• preg_match_all -> global search
• preg_match -> singular
• preg_replace -> replace with capture group
• (?:) -> non-capture group
• ?= -> positive lookahead
  • /\d+(?=\w+)/
• (?!) -> negative lookahead
• (<=) -> look behind
• grep -E -> extended
• filter_var is better than regexp
• preg_quote

React and the Art of Gamification - Courtney Yatteau

• Gamification - point,badges,stricts
• https://github.com/cyatteau/js-tek-2026-react-gamification/blob/main/slides.pdf
• Feedback timing is important
• Delayed reward
• want click -> instant feedback -> save -> confirm
• What is gamification?
  • "... the process of using gaming thinking and game dynamics to engage audiences and solve problems."
• Why gamification?
• GAMES
  • Gamified UI Elements - badges, progress bars, etc.
  • Advanced State Control - 1 action causes multiple actions
  • Memoization/Modern Optimization -
  • Efficient Rendering - should the UI even been rendereed (badges don't need to be displayed if there isn't a change)
  • Social Interactions - leaderboards