PHP Tek 2026
19 - 21 May 2026 at Sheraton O'Hare Suites

Good in-depth dive into OpenApi. I've used it for years, but I still learned some new things. I particularly liked learning about the history of the project, which helps explain how things ended up like they are. Great talk with good technical details and well presented. Good job Ben!

Great advice on how to better leverage AI in your day-to-day workflows without the tools going off the rails.

Great examples and discussion of upcoming features already in 8.6 and those that might make it.

Very good information and I learned a lot. Going in, I knew what idempotency was and I often advocate for my team to create idempotent/pure methods as often as possible (and where appropriate) but I hadn't thought about applying the concept to API endpoints specifically yet. Now I will.

One disagreement I had with the content presented is...I don't think GET is inherently idempotent. Consider an endpoint like `/shows/near-me?city=boston&genre=country`. If the platform allows customers to publish new events that meet these criteria (as Bandsintown does) then the result of this query will change from request-to-request. So I'm not sure I agree with the middleware code sample shown that basically does `if (GET) { doNothing() }` (paraphrasing)

Lots of fascinating and useful information. We are still on PHPUnit 10 at the moment, so it was good to hear that most of the cool features that were discussed should be available on that version. I especially liked that the author advised breaking out of the typical structure of a test class with the setUp() and tearDown() methods and replacing them with reusable methods.

I'm...a little more wary of traits. Not vehemently-against them, but in my experience they tend to be misused. So I'm a little reticent to sprinkle them throughout the test base, but if they make things like test fixtures and boring setup more accessible, which in turn makes tests easier to write, which in turn helps us write MORE tests...then that is a good thing.

Lots of really great info and useful architectures/checklists/pillars to take note of and take back home to figure out how to integrate into our app. This talk may be another such talk that suffers from not having enough time dedicated, BECAUSE I would have liked to see more code examples. Specifically, of using publicly-available/OSS libraries for demonstrating the concepts being taught. It is well-known that the second-most dangerous thing to NOT having a security layer, is DIY'ing your security layer. I would have loved to hear more about some of the security libraries that were mentioned only briefly.

A very good talk, I learned a lot despite being a heavy PHPStan lv. 8 user for several years. I appreciated all of the information about generics (did you know, the symbol being debated in the RFCs for generics in PHP right now is called "turbofish"? lol.) I also liked how the speaker established a roadmap for their talk early on and kept referring back to it. The pacing was excellent.

A very interesting talk that had a lot of useful information that I did not previously know about Nginx! Now it has me wondering if we should incrementally switch from Apache to Nginx and exactly how much PHP code that would allow us to rip out. I can think of at least two middlewares that could be retired IF Nginx is capable enough and scalable enough. Which, by all reports, it should be.

The one question that remains in my mind is, should we solve these problems in Nginx or in Cloudflare? We are a whitelabeled app, and so we are locked into Cloudflare for their $upport for that $olution. So, do we lean into Cloudflare workers, which are apparently a wrapper around Nginx or at least similar, or do we port our actual app to Nginx?

This was a very interesting talk, Alex is a really clear and engaging presenter. The potential of bringing Go extensions into PHP is exciting, and this talk gives a really clear example of how to get started - lots to start playing with!

I was unfortunately disappointed with this talk and the speaker. The speaker asked the audience what a stored procedure was, was given an answer that was more-or-less textbook correct, and replied with "no" followed by "this isn't a quiz" followed by a regurgitation (1 slide later) of the exact definition that was given, but in more words. I spoke to several other engineers after the talk and they were equally confused and shocked at the exchange.

Additionally, the speaker covered a topic of which I am quite familiar, injecting secrets/vars into running containers from AWS Parameter Store, and stated something that was contrary to my experience. So, I asked about it. The information that we were given was...not correct. I double-checked by reading the AWS documentation and *triple*-checked by reproducing the situation in my live (nonprod) infrastructure. I was pretty surprised that such wrong information was presented with such authority.

As others mentioned, this talk was highly specific to a web-based, AWS-hosted application. I think the presentation would have been better if it was more generic, and taught concepts like Strangler Fig, Strategy Pattern, and lift-and-shift.