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.
GLM-5 (MIT), Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4 and Qwen3.6 all caught up to the frontier this year. I swapped my agent to a top open-weight model expecting better diffs and got the same occasional failures — because the model was never the bottleneck. The harness is (tools, context assembly, retries, verification). Plus the self-hosting asterisk: 'open weights' ≠ 'runs on your box'.
Observability tooling sells the full logs+metrics+traces meal, but my blog is one PHP process and one DB. Distributed tracing on a single-service box is air-traffic control for a paper plane. What actually earns its place: centralized log search + RED metrics from the access log. No always-on OpenTelemetry, no Tempo. The complement to my Beszel setup.
Fibers are mature, AMPHP and ReactPHP share one event loop via Revolt, and the concurrency jokes are finally wrong. So how much must a Drupal dev learn? Almost none directly — Drupal's synchronous DB blocks the whole model. The one real win (parallel outbound HTTP in a queue worker) Guzzle already gives you, no Fibers required.
A Google/Microsoft-backed proposal lets your page hand an AI agent real callable tools instead of screenshot-and-guess. Chrome's already trialing it. But it's a W3C draft (not a standard), the API is churning, and the security fine print is stark: tools run with your logged-in auth and there's no mandated consent model. Clever, and a new attack surface — both at once.
Technitium is a lovely all-in-one DNS server — authoritative, recursive, and ad-blocking. I run it, but I do NOT let it be the authoritative nameserver for my domain. On one box that turns 'my site is down for an hour' into 'my domain doesn't exist for an hour' (site, email, subdomains — all gone). Where the line is, the hidden-primary pattern, and the open-resolver risk.
The tidy 'Rules is stuck, use ECA' story is out of date — Rules shipped a stable 4.0.1 in Feb 2026. But it already lost, and why says something honest about 'no-code': ECA models are version-controlled YAML you can't actually review in a diff, can't breakpoint, can't unit-test. Where ECA is the right tool, and where a 30-line event subscriber wins.
Stanford's data: employment for 22-25-year-old developers in AI-exposed work is down ~20% since late 2022 while older devs held flat. The scary chart is real; the wrong lesson is 'AI took the jobs.' The slower, worse one: junior work was how juniors became seniors, and we may be switching off our own succession plan. Honest about the multi-causal mess (ZIRP, rates, Section 174) too.