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Two readonly keywords for two properties in a two-property class. That is what an immutable Money looks like in PHP 8.1: final class Money { public function __construct( public readonly int $amount, public readonly string $currency, ) {} } PHP 8.2 is at release candidate stage, and the feature I am waiting for is this one. The keyword moves up and says it once: final readonly class Money { public function __construct( public int $amount, public string $currency, ) {} } Every property is readonly, and the class refuses dynamic properties on top. Cosmetics, yes. But cosmetics that make the right thing the short thing, and that changes what people actually write. ...

A supplier price list, loaded into staging_prices, then reconciled against prices. Since PostgreSQL 15 came out two weeks ago, that is one statement: MERGE INTO prices p USING staging_prices s ON p.sku = s.sku WHEN MATCHED AND s.price IS NULL THEN DELETE WHEN MATCHED AND p.price <> s.price THEN UPDATE SET price = s.price, updated_at = now() WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN INSERT (sku, price) VALUES (s.sku, s.price); Before 15 this was three statements in a transaction, or a stored procedure, or a loop in PHP. Now it is one statement that says what it does. Update changed rows, delete withdrawn ones, insert new ones. People coming from Oracle and SQL Server waited a decade for this. The conditional WHEN MATCHED AND ... branches are the real value. ON CONFLICT cannot express “delete when the source says so” at all. ...

$invoice->totall = 250; One extra letter. No error, no warning. A second property appears, the real total stays null, and the bug surfaces three screens later as “total is empty sometimes”. I have hunted this exact bug. Twice. Both times it took hours, because the write looks correct and the read looks correct. They just disagree on one letter. PHP 8.2 lands in December, and the deprecation that will touch the most code is this one. Writing to an undeclared property becomes deprecated. In some future major it becomes an error. For fifteen years it was legal: ...

The profiler said the query takes 20 ms. The export endpoint took 900 ms and a quarter of a gigabyte of memory. The missing 880 ms was Doctrine turning five thousand rows into five thousand entities. Hydration is not free. For every row the ORM builds an object, fills properties through reflection, registers it in the unit of work, creates proxies for relations. Per row it is nothing. Times five thousand, it is the endpoint. The profiler shows SQL because SQL is easy to show. ...

Audit snapshots, product attributes, and a document with two hot keys. Three cases from one Postgres project, one question for each: column or JSONB. I answer it by looking at queries, not at data. Audit snapshots. When an order changes, we store the whole previous state. Nobody queries inside it. It is read as a blob, whole, rarely, by a human during an incident. Perfect JSONB. Normalizing it would mean a dozen tables for data nobody joins. ...

Forty lines of $request->get() before the first line of real logic. That was the controller nobody wanted to touch, and the Symfony 6.1 upgrade was my excuse to open it. An action that reads ten request fields by hand does two jobs. It translates HTTP into data, and it runs the use case. The first job is boring and repeated in every action, which is exactly why it should not be written by hand ten times. Symfony has argument resolvers for this since 3.1. People just do not use them for their own types. ...

FCALL update_if_newer 1 user:42 17. One round trip, a name instead of a SHA, and it survives a restart. Redis 7 came out last week, and Functions are the feature I care about. Everything EVAL scripts should have been. The problem they solve is real. Take compare-and-update: set a value only if the stored version is older. From PHP it is three round trips and a race between them. WATCH/MULTI works but is ugly and retries under contention. A Lua script does it atomically in one trip, and that is why we all wrote Lua scripts. But scripts are anonymous blobs. The application carries the source, sends it on every deploy, and debugging starts with “which SHA is this”. Functions fix the operational part: the library lives in Redis, has a name, has a version. ...

A failed job that retries every second, one hundred times, against a payment provider that is already down. That is a small DDoS with a queue in front of it. If the provider needs five minutes to recover, hammering it for the first two achieves nothing except log volume. Symfony Messenger has everything needed. You just have to configure it on purpose: framework: messenger: transports: async: dsn: '%env(MESSENGER_TRANSPORT_DSN)%' retry_strategy: max_retries: 5 delay: 2000 multiplier: 4 failure_transport: failed Two seconds, eight, thirty two, and so on. Exponential backoff gives the external service room to breathe. I also add jitter in a custom retry strategy, because a hundred messages that failed together will otherwise retry together, in one synchronized wave. Same failure, five times. ...

Sixty million rows in orders, a new nullable column total_cents from expand-and-contract, and a Friday afternoon. The question is how to fill it. The naive answer is one statement. UPDATE orders SET total_cents = ROUND(total * 100). On a test database it works. On production it holds row locks on the whole table for the whole run, writes one giant chunk of WAL, and the replica falls minutes behind. On MySQL the binlog gets the same present. One project I worked on learned this on that Friday. Since then I backfill only in batches. ...

One evening. That was the Laravel 9 upgrade on a mid-size project last week. Most of the diff was composer.json and a few config files. Laravel 9 is out this month. Symfony 6 components under the hood, PHP 8.0 minimum, Flysystem 3. And from now on, one major per year. The upgrade guide is short, and the “high impact” section is shorter. This is a policy: small majors, often. I want to defend this policy, because I remember the other kind. A project that sat on an old major for three years, because “we will upgrade when there is time”. There is never time. Then the version goes EOL, a security fix forces the jump, and you pay three years of drift in one horrible month. Packages you depend on drop support one by one, and suddenly it is not a framework upgrade anymore. It is archaeology. ...