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Magazine › 2026 › Modernize with htmx

Welcome to the September issue of PHP Architect. Stop everything! Did you know that at this very minute, Tek 27 Call For Papers is LIVE?! It gets better… You can also purchase early-bird tickets to Tek 27 right now!! Breathe, take a minute, let yourself process that amazing info. Now that you’ve let that sink in, what are you waiting for?? Submit those ideas! Some of the best talks come from just an idea you’ve been stewing over. Use the easy link right here for CFP https://sessionize.com/php-tek-2027/ And this link for early-bird tickets https://ti.to/phptek/phptek-2027

The Best Ideas Don’t Respect Borders

I’ve run PHPCPD for longer than I want to admit in print. It does what it needs to, which is find the duplicated blocks someone (not me…) copied from one class into another when I they were in a hurry, and it flagged them so we could go back and clean them up. The trouble is that the project stopped being maintained a while ago, and one of our security scanning tools flagged it as being “unmaintained” and therefore “insecure” (it’s not). So, I went looking for a replacement. by Scott Keck-Warren

From Downtime to Uptime: Building Resilient PHP Apps – Part X

In Part IX, we treated queues as real production infrastructure. Once asynchronous work is bounded and durable, the next weak point is often much closer to the request itself – the PHP runtime. by Wendell Adriel

Backpropagation: The Secret to Teaching Networks What They Did Wrong

We’ve talked about how neural networks make predictions through forward propagation, and how gradient descent helps them learn by adjusting weights. But we’ve been glossing over a crucial detail – how does the network actually know which weights to adjust and by how much? That’s where backpropagation comes in – one of the most elegant algorithms in computer science and the secret sauce that makes deep learning possible. by Christopher Miller

The Quantum RNG That Failed My Audit

A few years back, [this column took apart the Mersenne Twister algorithm](https://phpa.me/security-corner-2026-09-01). The lesson was blunt – watch 624 outputs and you own the generator’s entire internal state. Output that looks perfectly random can still be perfectly predictable. Statistical beauty, zero security. by Eric Mann

Grumpy Testing Patterns – Reducing Conditional Logic In Tests