Hi

I'm celebrating! It's not my birthday, rather it's the birthday of my sci-fi novel "Timeline Taxi". I began writing this book as a way to deal with burnout, and it worked out really well for me. I know it's something not everyone is interested in (we'll get back to programming updates in a paragraph or two), but it is something I'm really proud of and do want to share with "whomever it may concern" 😁

To celebrate, I've published an extended version of Timeline Taxi with six brand-new chapters, and have a 50% coupon for you on Leanpub (valid until Oct 24th). On top of that, there's now also a hardcover version available; you can find all info on timeline-taxi.com. Finally, I'm also drafting a sequel, but that will take a bit longer to complete.

Now, as promised, we'll go back to PHP news, but if you have something you're proud of yourself outside of IT, I'm so eager to hear more about it! I think it can be really inspiring to learn from others, so hit reply, and let me know!

From the feed

Now that Aggregate is back in action, I'm finally able to again share noteworthy content from around the web that caught my eye. If you have anything to add to this list, don't hesitate to let me know!

• Internals are discussing the removal of Pear — "removal" is a tricky word, as are many things when it comes to internals, but at least there's some movement. Above all, I hope composer can finally get some official recognition by internals that it is the de-fact package manager for PHP.
• The past and future of vibe coding — I'm not a vibe coder, but I think there are some good insights in this post.
• The true async RFC — is still being worked on. We might actually get there one day!
• In praise of "normal" engineers — "It can be humbling to think of ourselves as normal people, but most of us are in fact pretty normal people, […] Great engineers are made, not born"
• Maybe you're not sick of programming — maybe there are some other problems taking away your joy?
• Why optimistic merging works better — the author of this post takes things to the extreme, but I find it a fascinating mindset, and will likely make a video about it soon.
• Some of my own thoughts about desire paths and developer experience — in video format.

That's it for now, thank you for reading, and don't hesitate to reply if you have something to share!

Until next time

Brent