Happy Monday All!

Three pieces this week: a PHP 8.6 feature that cuts down on closures, a legacy app's move from CakePHP 2 to 5, and how to take a podcast break and still come back.

Partial Function Application in PHP 8.6: Pre-Fill Arguments Without Closures

PHP 8.6 adds ? and ... placeholders that pre-fill some arguments and hand back a Closure for the rest, so array_map(str_replace('Scott', 'Alice', ?), $names) replaces the arrow function I used to write. I cover how the placeholders work, how named arguments fit in, and how they clean up the pipe operator, which only accepts single-argument callables. This post kicks off a month of PHP 8.6 features, with clamp() and SortDirection up next.

cakePHP with Jamison Bryant

I talked with Jamison Bryant about what sets CakePHP apart from Laravel and Symfony and what its plugin ecosystem offers. Jamison led the move of TicketSauce from CakePHP 2 to CakePHP 5, and we dug into how the strangler fig pattern let that migration replace the legacy system piece by piece.

Podcast Hiatus vs. Podfade: How to Pause Without Quitting

Over on The Steady Pack I wrote about the line between a planned break and a slow fade. A hiatus has a decision, a reason, and a return date, and a podfade has none of them. The post covers picking your restart trigger before you stop, keeping the break short, and what to publish during the gap. If you don't plan to return, I make the case for ending the show cleanly.

See you next Monday.