Hi

I don't know about you, but summer holidays are always a bit chaotic for me with the kids being home from school for two months. Nevertheless I find it important to write to you on a semi-regular basis, and today I found some time.

I've actually seen a lot of interesting content passing through my feed lately, which I'm happy to share; but before doing so, I want to quickly circle back to "chaos time". This might not be the same for you, but I'm pretty bad at context switching — and you can imagine how working from home during the summer break requires more context-switching than usual. I was reminded of two years ago when I came pretty close to burning out, and delibirately had to take some time to recharge.

Luckily I've learned from that prior experience, and I'm now much more aware of guarding my own boundaries. Still, it's probably a good time to remind myself (and maybe you?) of the most important lesson I learned back then: amidst all the chaos, please find something that gives you joy. Joy alone doesn't pay the bills, I know that, but taking care of your own well-being is just so — so important. Maybe this message isn't for you, but I'm fairly certain there are some readers here who need that reminder. I know I need it often enough.

Personally, I've found tremendous joy lately in revisiting an old passion of mine, and making some content about it (I just can't help it 😅) I figure I might as well share it with you, even though it's not programming related at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0-m0Z4mRZw.

That being said, if you have the need to share about how you're doing during the summer break, don't hesitate to press reply!

Now, on to what's been happening in the PHP world and beyond.

From the feed

• Proper logging with PSR-3 — seems like Ocramius is blogging again! Some pretty interesting takeaways and best-practices about logging.
• Writing the PHP VM in Rust — a fun experiment by jolicode.
• Your application is already an MCP server — a pretty cool new Tempest feature was released!
• The Foundation is starting the PHP Onboarding Initiative — I think Elizabeth is doing a great job on many fronts to improve PHP's reputation
• Codex and I deleted production — makes me chuckle, some good lessons to learn from this one
• The new polling API in PHP 8.5 — I explain what the new polling API is in PHP 8.6; and also what it is not
• Updating Bref 2 to Bref 3 — serverless PHP is definitely out of my area of expertise, but nevertheless an interesting read
• What's new in PHP 8.6 — in case you missed the previous newsletter

That's all for this newsletter, take care!

Brent