Most PHP applications eventually run on Kubernetes – but developers rarely touch it until something breaks in production. Understanding the basics of Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, and HPA makes debugging much faster. I show the minimum Kubernetes knowledge a PHP/Magento developer needs: reading logs, exec into pods, understanding why a pod is crashing, and writing a sensible Deployment YAML.
Specification is a pattern that encapsulates a business rule as a composable object. Instead of scattering if-else checks throughout the codebase, you name the rule, make it testable, and combine it with AND, OR, NOT. I show a PHP implementation with composition operators and apply it to product eligibility rules in Magento 2.
This is the 100th post on this blog. I started writing in July 2018, documenting what I was learning and building. 6.5 years, PHP 7.2 through 8.4, Magento 2.2 through 2.4.8, 100 posts. A retrospective – what changed, what stayed the same, and what I would tell myself in 2018 if I could.
PHP 8.5 RFCs are actively being discussed on the php.net internals list. The pipe operator proposal has been debated for years and may finally ship. Readonly property inheritance fixes an inconsistency. Generics are discussed but will not come in 8.5. I look at the most impactful proposals, show what the code would look like, and explain why generics remain out of reach in the short term.
Magento 2 indexers maintain denormalised data structures – flat tables, price indexes, category-product mappings – that make frontend queries fast. The built-in indexers cover most needs, but complex custom features sometimes need their own. I show how to build a custom indexer from scratch: mview.xml for change tracking, the indexer class with full and partial reindex, and triggering via cron.
2025 is shaping up as a year of consolidation in the PHP ecosystem. FrankenPHP changes how PHP applications are deployed. AI tooling has matured from “experimental toy” to “daily assistant”. OpenSearch has fully replaced Elasticsearch in the Magento ecosystem. Hyvä has become the default frontend choice. I review where things stand and what is worth learning in the next twelve months.
Magento 2.4.8 was released in April 2025 and is the most significant update in the 2.4.x line. PHP 8.4 support, dropping official Elasticsearch support in favour of OpenSearch, and a long list of dependency updates make this a mandatory upgrade for projects that want to stay on supported software. I show what actually changes and provide a practical upgrade checklist.
LRU Cache (Least Recently Used) is the caching strategy where the item accessed longest ago is evicted when the cache is full. The naive O(n) implementation is too slow for tight loops. A proper O(1) implementation requires combining a doubly linked list (access order) with a hash map (O(1) lookup). I implement it from scratch in PHP and show how it maps to the per-request in-memory cache pattern used in Magento 2.
Redis Streams is a data structure added in Redis 5.0 that combines the simplicity of a log with consumer groups and acknowledgement semantics. For Magento 2 it offers a robust alternative to RabbitMQ for message queuing: persistent messages, consumer groups, pending message redelivery, and dead letter handling – without the operational overhead of a dedicated AMQP broker.
PHP 8.4 was officially released on 21 November 2024. After the RC months I had code ready to merge the day it went stable. A month in production gives me a clear picture of what property hooks look like in real module code, where asymmetric visibility is actually useful versus where it is overkill, and how BcMath\Number compares to the traditional bcmath functions in practice.