Long-form writing on Drupal, PHP frameworks, AI tooling, automated testing and everything else in a working programmer's stack — shipped from production, not theory.
The php.net release schedule is down to its last checkpoint: RC5 on November 5, GA on November 19, 2026. Here's the full timeline from alpha to release, and what the one-RC-left milestone actually means for anyone planning a production upgrade.
I write subagent model-selection rules into my global CLAUDE.md as a matter of habit. A string of October releases quietly added the actual knob for it — a per-agent effort parameter, fork subagents on by default, and the UI finally showing the effort level actually in force. Here's the commit history, from someone who uses this daily.
A customer's fat-payload queue jobs took seconds to reserve, not milliseconds — and it had nothing to do with row count. Here's what the GitHub issue actually showed, the index that fixed it, and why MySQL has to read a column you never sort on.
Alpha.18 ripped out Craft's own system-status mechanism and replaced it with Laravel's native maintenance mode outright, not alongside it. For plugin authors it's a real breaking change with a deprecation shim attached — and a concrete receipt for a claim that was easy to be skeptical of.
Alpha.19 replaces Craft's upload stack with Uppy, shared upload sessions, and tus/S3 multipart transports — uploads that can bypass the PHP process entirely and survive you navigating away mid-upload. It's also a real breaking change for anyone hooking the old multipart endpoints.
Dockhand's BSL 1.1 promised a fixed Apache 2.0 conversion date. That date quietly became a rolling four-year window per release — which never actually arrives if the project keeps shipping. A reminder to read the license text, not the marketing page, before building infrastructure around a tool.
While everyone covered Drupal 12's removal list, the release that actually halved query counts vs 11.3 shipped five months earlier with far less attention. Here's what 11.4 actually changed under the hood — Brotli, the new dr CLI, argon2id, and the benchmark numbers Drupal.org published.