PHP Podcast – August 20, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling

Shirley MacLaine is the answer — but what’s the question? RAM prices went up 500%, GitHub fell over for eight hours, and the crew figured out how you can actually contribute to PHP. Glasses optional.

Shirley MacLaine, Green Room Shade, and the Show’s New Normal
The episode opens with Joe flustered — not because it’s a “flustered day,” but because there’s shade being thrown in the green room backstage chat. Rather than spoil the drama, the crew turns a mysterious green-room answer into a running bit: “Shirley MacLaine” is the answer, and listeners are invited to submit what the question was. It’s declared the first round of PHP Architect’s Jeopardy, complete with its own Easter egg sound cue.

Joe also lays out where the show is heading. Eric and John took over the podcast the previous week to relive their glory days, and the plan is for the old guys to step back to roughly one episode a month. Joe and Sara are working on something to fill one slot, another mystery show is in the works pending signed contracts, and Alive and Kicking is confirmed still alive and kicking after a great recent episode with Derek. Joe also plugs the PHP 8.6 Beta 1 tag and Scott Keck-Warren’s PHP Community Podcast interview with release managers Daniel Scherzer and Matteo Bacotti.

The RAM Apocalypse: 500% in Twelve Months
The big topic of the week is the ongoing memory and chip crisis. Memory prices have climbed 500% in twelve months, and the crew commiserates about the parts they wish they’d bought bigger. Sara explains the brutal math: you can’t build a semiconductor fab fast enough — two or three years minimum — and by the time one comes online nobody knows if we’ll have overproduction or a burst bubble. Worse, Sara notes that essentially every RAM stick through the end of 2027 is already accounted for and sold to vendors.

The ripple effects are everywhere. Console prices are going up instead of down late in their cycle, with next-gen consoles projected to start at $1,000 or more. The hobbyist single-board computer market is getting crushed — Pine64 announced they’re stepping back from making hardware, and a Raspberry Pi 5 that debuted cheap now runs over 100 pounds. Holly’s new PC, bought at the start of 2025, ended up shipped 3,000 kilometers the wrong way to California and is stuck awaiting import paperwork, leaving her leaning on a laptop and some now-precious Raspberry Pi zeros.

The nostalgia gets thick as the crew reminisces about DIP chips, EDO RAM, Pentiums, Epson 486s, Tandy 1000s, and the TRS-80. Special venom is reserved for Packard Bell (“utter freaking trash”) and Gateway 2000’s cow-pattern branding — which Sara confirms sold better in Wisconsin than anywhere, though hay bales in a Berkeley storefront still boggle the mind. A chat comment about technicians de-soldering and reballing BGA RAM chips becoming economically viable gets a hearty “absolutely.”

Memory-Aware Development and Why PHP 7 Doubled Down
Bringing the RAM crisis back to PHP, Joe wishes more developers were aware of how their applications consume and release memory — a lesson he credits to learning enough C back in the day, where you have to manage memory yourself. He connects sloppy memory awareness to the N+1 query problems web developers keep tripping over.

Sara drops a great deep dive: a significant reason PHP 7 was roughly twice as fast as PHP 5 was changes in the memory layout. Every variable became referenced by one fewer pointer, and while eight bytes sounds trivial, every level of indirection adds time across every single instruction and access. Sara adds the CPU-level detail — one layer of indirection can be a single instruction on most architectures, but adding a second layer can push a lookup from one instruction to three.

That leads into a warm tangent about learning C to become game developers. Sara’s evergreen joke: “I’m going to be a game developer” is the programmer’s version of “I’m going to buy a bar.” Great people, brutal hours, endless competition, and the reality of hitting spacebar 400 times to figure out why you can phase through a wall. The cat-reading-the-paper “I should buy a boat” meme makes an appearance to seal it.

The GitHub Outage and the Monoculture Problem
Monday’s eight-hour GitHub outage hit the crew directly. Holly couldn’t use a site that only offered “log in with GitHub,” and Joe got kicked out of his CLI auth session mid-PR with no way to re-authenticate. To GitHub’s credit, they published an incident update and a follow-up blog post: a service auto-scaled so aggressively to handle network traffic that the sidecar and supporting services couldn’t keep up, bringing the whole thing down.

The conversation turns to whether this is self-inflicted. Joe recalls GitHub’s pre-Microsoft, gold-standard reliability and wonders aloud how much the decline lines up with Copilot’s arrival and internal AI adoption, with uptime reportedly slipping below a single nine at points. Sara defends them somewhat — the number of actions, CPU cores, and pull requests has genuinely hockey-sticked, partly because AI has emboldened people who previously wouldn’t have opened a PR. But as Joe puts it, the call is coming from inside the house, since GitHub itself has been pushing AI.

On alternatives, Joe says the least-jarring migration for PHP Architect’s clients would be self-hosting GitLab, since GitHub Actions and GitLab runners are nearly identical in syntax — Atlassian’s Bitbucket, by contrast, is a bridge too far, mostly because the entire ecosystem assumes you’re on GitHub. Sara names this the core problem: monoculture. The crew discusses package mirrors, local caches, 12-factor thinking, and Composer’s support for custom mirrors, all while remembering the PHP repo intrusion years ago that came from an unmaintained self-hosted Git server. The takeaway: owning your pipeline end-to-end is the only way an outage can’t stop you — and Joe teases spinning up a self-hosted GitLab now that “the boss” (Sara) has signed off.

How to Contribute to PHP (and Handling Security Reports)
The crew highlights two PHP Foundation blog posts. First, Matt Stauffer’s “How to Contribute to PHP,” adapted from a talk he gave at Atlanta PHP. It goes well beyond “learn C,” clearly separating the PHP project, the PHP ecosystem, and the Foundation, and lays out approachable on-ramps: testing pre-releases (PHP 8.6 Beta 1 is out, Beta 2 lands next week), improving documentation, and writing tests — which, spoiler, are written in PHP, not C, using PHP’s own test format that’s simple enough to learn from any single example.

Other contribution paths include triaging and reviewing issues across PHP repositories — invaluable work that frees core developers from wading through AI-generated slop bug reports — and participating in internals via the well-documented mailing list process, up to and including running for release manager (8.7 managers will be needed before you know it). Sara points folks to discord.phpc.chat for the PHP Discord, with dedicated Internals and Foundation channels for anyone the mailing list intimidates.

Second, Sebastian Bergmann’s “So you received a security report. Now what?” is a jump-around reference for application developers rather than a front-to-back read, walking through roughly ten steps to triage, validate, and resolve reported issues the right way. Sara shares a real-world example from mobile: a flagged package that was only exploitable on a rooted device with an actively hostile package installed alongside it — a very different risk profile than a SQL injection on an API endpoint. Cue reminiscing about writing SQL against Access databases over ODBC from PHP (and Perl) back in the 90s, and Joe’s advice for handling any security report: don’t panic, and always know where your towel is.

Links from the show:

PHP Tek 2027 — April 27–29, 2027 in Chicago; early bird tickets & hotel available now
PHP Tek 2027 CFP
Audio versions of the podcast at phparch.com
Join us live on Discord at discord.phparch.com
PHP Discord — discord.phpc.chat
Community Corner Podcast: PHP 8.5 + 8.6 Release Manager Daniel Scherzer
Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
So You Received a Security Report. Now What?
How to Contribute to PHP
Shirley MacLaine

Host:

Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.

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