PHP Alive And Kicking – Episode 16 – Wendell Adriel

Wendell joins the show with a literal fire background (the “this is fine” meme), which he admits he can’t use anymore because of company backgrounds. But it’s an accurate representation of daily developer life, and we can all relate.

Teaching PHP Six Months After Learning It

At 16 years old, working in a small-town Brazilian school teaching Word and Excel, Wendell took a PHP course. Five or six months later, the teacher left and they asked Wendell to take over—teaching PHP to 13 and 14-year-olds when he was barely older himself. Students would ask questions he didn’t know the answer to, forcing him to say “give me a minute” while frantically searching the documentation. But that pressure? It taught him the most valuable developer skill: knowing how to find answers to things you don’t know.

No Computer at Home

Here’s the kicker: Wendell didn’t even have a computer at home during all this. He could only use the computers at work, so he’d finish lunch in 15 minutes just to get back to his desk and keep learning PHP. The obsession was real, and it paid off.

PHP Documentation: The Unsung Hero

Everyone agrees—PHP’s documentation is insanely good. You can find almost anything without even hitting Stack Overflow. Comments from 15-20 years ago still work today because PHP maintains backwards compatibility like no other language. Those old comments aren’t just relics; they’re still valid, working code that new developers can learn from. Try that in JavaScript land.

Rector: The Migration Miracle

Moving legacy code to modern PHP used to be a nightmare. Now? Install Rector and watch it automatically migrate your codebase to use new features. Wendell highlights this as one of PHP’s secret weapons—the community builds tools that make everyone’s life easier.

When AI Becomes Part of Your Workflow

some literally can’t work without Claude, Cursor, and PHPStorm anymore. Not because he needs AI for everything, but because the anxiety of “what if I need to ask something?” kicks in if it’s not there. It’s wild how quickly we adapt to new tools—especially considering 25 years ago we barely had IDEs. We had Notepad. If we were lucky.

The Imposter Syndrome Reality Check

Everyone Googles stuff. Every. Single. Person. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are or how many packages you’ve written—at some point, you’re searching for answers. The skill isn’t memorizing everything; it’s knowing where to look and how to find the right answer. Mike and Chris both admit they struggle with imposter syndrome constantly. You’re not alone.

PHP Can Do Everything Now

CLI apps? Easy. Web apps? Obviously. Desktop applications? Yep. Mobile applications with PHP? Absolutely—and Wendell admits he never thought that would be possible. With AI advancements and tools like the new official MCP SDK for PHP, the possibilities keep expanding. JavaScript might get there first, but PHP always catches up.

New Security Challenges: Prompt Injection

Frameworks already protect us from SQL injection and script injection. But now with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and AI integration, we have a new threat: prompt injection. How will PHP frameworks adapt? How do we secure AI-powered applications? These are the new challenges keeping the community on its toes.

Teaser: Laravel Service Container Deep Dive

Wendell drops a teaser—he’s publishing his longest blog post yet about how Laravel’s service container works. By the time this episode goes live, it’ll probably already be out. Worth the read.

Listen to hear why the PHP community attracts experts from other languages, and why everyone keeps confusing their show schedule with the video game Fortnite.

Links From The Show:

Wendell’s blog: https://wendelladriel.com/blog

Inside The Service Container: https://wendelladriel.com/blog/inside-the-laravel-service-container

Laravel Queues Under The Hood: https://wendell