php[podcast] Episode 23.3.1

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John Congdon
Welcome to the official podcast of PHP Architect. Join us to listen to the latest news and tech talk from our conferences, the magazine and wider PHP community.

You’re listening to the PHP podcast episode 23 dot 3.1 bring you the latest insights into the PHP architect magazine conferences and so much more. I’m your host, John Condon. And with me as my friend and business partner, Eric Van Johnson.

Eric Van Johnson
Hello, hello,

John Congdon
man. I’m starting to like this. It’s starting to it’s starting to gel and come together.

Eric Van Johnson
We got matching hats now looking at us, ma’am. Team,

John Congdon
mine seems darker. But I think you just have better lighting.

Eric Van Johnson
Yeah, no, I think your lighting is better. But yeah, I think you’re right. Mine was a little bright. How’s it going? John?

John Congdon
Is going we have got so much going on with the company. We do a to a fault. We share too much information. But probably. But I like that I like that we share. Yeah, things that are going on business wise and just with us in general. So with that, how have you been doing?

Eric Van Johnson
I feel like I just talked to you about this. But I’m doing well. I’m really, really excited about tech. I’ve been real happy with the ticket sales. I mean, obviously, you want to sell out, right? I mean, that’s always kind of one of the goals. But it was good to see people are still interested in going to conferences are interested again, in going to conferences, I guess is a better way of putting it. So excited about that. Get some new sponsors for the for the conference. That’s exciting.

John Congdon
We’ll talk about that soon. For sure.

Eric Van Johnson
That’s, that’s all? Yeah, it’s just everything’s everything’s happening. I’m enjoying it.

John Congdon
Well, let’s, let’s talk a little bit about the business and how things have been going there. Because I can tell you, I’ve been stressed for the past couple of weeks. It’s just the past couple of weeks. Well, well, longer. I mean, we’ve talked about the struggles in the past with getting the magazine out the door. Like we, we strive to get it out early in the month. And there’s no exact timeframe. There’s nothing on the site that says we release on the first or the fifth of every month. It’s just a monthly magazine. But when we get this late in the month, and it’s not released yet, it’s stressful. And we are a community magazine, right? It’s not we’re not professionals, we didn’t go to school for this. So having deadlines for people and enforcing them is really tricky, especially when they’re not your employees. It’s not like you can

Eric Van Johnson
they have real jobs and everybody’s

John Congdon
working. You can’t crack the witness II get into us now all we can do is beg and plead, which we do a really good job at.

Eric Van Johnson
Yeah, yeah.

John Congdon
So there was a combination of things. We got, like a handful, or two or three of the articles super late this month, which is unusual. Usually they’re not badly. But we had a few super late. And I think we’re going to talk about Joe Ferguson had something come up workwise. So he had to step away for what, two or three months. So we got somebody to fill in his shoes and friend of the show, Ben Ramsey is giving us a couple of articles. And this month is just his workflow and how what he uses and just kind of almost like a little insight into Ben, which is always fun to read.

Eric Van Johnson
Exactly, yeah, I enjoy that I enjoy seeing how other people get their job done. And I, I almost always learn like a new tool or a new trick that I can apply to my own personal workflow,

John Congdon
right? Because you can’t just say, I write PHP code because people use different IDE is different. Different services, like what you use for code deployment may be different than what I use. And so it’s interesting to see how other people do things. And then you take it with a grain of salt. It works for them. Is it something you want to try?

Eric Van Johnson
A weird side effect for me for being this intimate with the magazine now is seeing everything before we release it because I overshare and I like to see these articles and I just want to start talking about it. Like I had already tweeted about one or two two Whoo, I tweeted about to column.

John Congdon
I know finally you finally

Eric Van Johnson
met in the the FFI one, which I was really kind of taken aback on how, how good that that article was and, and really kind of opened up my eyes a little bit on how you can actually use the new PHP FFI. I forget what it stands for now, do you remember something? Something interface?

John Congdon
No, I don’t. I’m not even gonna guess because I was about way wrong.

Eric Van Johnson
Yeah, so it’s basically if you’re not familiar with it, it’s it’s essentially allowing your PHP application to interface with other applications that aren’t PHP, so that you can have like, you know, a C app out there or a Python app out there. The one example that they use in the article is this application called Duck dB. In using that with PHP, even though it’s not designed to work with PHP, man, I’m like, wow, I this really kind of seems like it has a lot of possibilities and things we can do with it. Yeah, that was a good one. So I but yeah, I oversee, I read those things. And immediately I want to start talking about I mean, it’s very difficult for me, and I gotta remember, I’m like, have we released this one yet? We have you actually been published.

John Congdon
That’s nothing wrong with building a little excitement around it. But I want to finish my thought process on the stress behind it of trying to get the magazine out. Not only did we get columns submitted to us wait, it once we get them it takes time to prove freedom lays them out. There’s so much that goes into it. On top of that, the weather here in California has been absolutely trashed the past few weeks. On top of that, my kids being sick, me being sick, my wife being sick. And again, we’re a very small company. My wife does majority of the the proofreading and laying out I do the finalizing of the magazine you do the cover work the the images, you do a lot of you become a graphic designer thought.

Eric Van Johnson
That’s a terrifying thing to say.

John Congdon
But I say hey, I need an image here and you give me one I’m like, Hey, is this Creative Commons? Like is it okay to use your I created? I’m like, Oh, okay.

Eric Van Johnson
I guess I guess it’s safe to use. Yeah. Bottom line

John Congdon
marches out, finally. And we’re almost ahead of the game for April. So we think that will come out relatively quickly.

Eric Van Johnson
From day one, for anybody attending tech. Oh, wait, am I are we sharing that? I’m oversharing. Again? Oh, he’s

John Congdon
oversharing. Too late. You’ve started that yet.

Eric Van Johnson
For anybody attending tech, there’s all sorts of fun things we have planned for the swag bag. I think it if you purchase a ticket, you already know what a couple other things are, like, the t shirt and other gifts. But the April magazine will be in your swag bag as well. A print edition of the April magazine will Yeah, that’s what we’re targeting

John Congdon
my poor printer. I don’t know how it’s gonna keep up.

Eric Van Johnson
It’s gonna be a lot of it’s that whole dot matrix. Man, that’s gonna be a lot of

John Congdon
we, I really liked the quality of the magazine that’s printed. So I’m hoping, you know, let people have a copy of it and feel it and like, they’ll just say, oh, yeah, remember having a magazine is so nice.

Eric Van Johnson
I we’ve anybody knows us know that. John. I have other podcasts I’ve shared on the other podcasts that I went to a conference here in California called scale, which stands for Southern California Linux Expo. It’s a long running conference here. Whenever I go to things like that. I always carry copies of the magazine with me because I’m very proud of it. And if anybody asks, I like to share, show him what we do it of course, I’m at scale, and I’m talking to people and they asked me actually, I’m like, Yeah, I’m the PSP architect, and I pull out a magazine, I show them and they’re looking at it. Like, so many of them, like, kept it. I’m like, you’re okay, you’re gonna keep that in my head, like, that’s a collector’s item, you’re gonna take care of

John Congdon
that issue anymore.

Eric Van Johnson
That’s like my issue number one. Exactly. So yeah, I handed apparently I handed out a lot of PHP architect magazines at scale.

John Congdon
Let me know I think we have a whole box full in the in the storage unit. Although they are older, not as relevant.

Eric Van Johnson
They’re not of our generation. We didn’t create those.

John Congdon
That is true. Speaking of tech, if you are listening and would like a discount to attend, we are offering listeners of the PHP podcast $100 off to join us in Chicago. Just use your little camera thing in and take a picture of that. Yeah, yeah. Because I don’t have to wait. It.

Eric Van Johnson
Takes it all takes just take a picture of it. Yeah, because

John Congdon
long story, there’s nowhere to put a discount code into the checkout flow. So I can’t say, oh, Use Discount Code. X, you have to use the link. But ah, I don’t want you to say about the link. So there’s a QR code. Just follow that. I like it. Yeah, I like to discuss that later. So yeah, we’re super excited about tech coming up. It’s only what 50 Some days away.

Eric Van Johnson
So I mean, I was sharing with you. April’s that our last? Well, ideally, we’ll have may release before we actually go to tech. But I don’t know, man. It’s very close. It’s much closer. It’s just like coming at you like a train.

John Congdon
53 days from today? Is the date still so much to figure it out? So much to do. But we’ll get there. I spent a lot of time today, just reaching out to PHP companies in the Ohio area, this time, just finding Ohio, PHP developers and trying to, you know, hey, PHP Tech’s, you know, in your backyard, basically, he should come out and join us.

Eric Van Johnson
Right, right. You mentioned how we’re really a community focused publication. And recently, we’ve started user groups up again. That’s been fun. You and I have both presented. We’ve had a couple of meetups and you and I both presented. I’m just curious, like, if you’re watching this, or not curious, I guess curious is when we’re encouraged, I want to encourage, if you have user groups, local user groups, or if you have a local youth group before the pandemic, and you don’t now, maybe it’s time to start one backup, obviously, whatever your kind of health and safety protocol things or protocols, yeah, are definitely want you to make sure you take care of yourself and your family. But if there’s an opportunity to start meeting in person again, I man, I just forget how much I enjoyed that it was it was such a pleasure to get get with people and hang out with them and just talk PHP and relax and joke and all that pizza.

John Congdon
It’s been much smaller than it used to be. But we’re also hosting in a different location. There’s a whole pandemic thing that’s happened. But it has been nice, just sitting down. And the editorial in this month’s magazine kind of focuses around the fact that we restarted the meetup. And what presenting to a meetup, a conference or your coworkers what that can mean. I learned more by sharing information. If I know I’m going to share information with other people, I’m gonna sit down and learn more about it. So I’m, I try to be ready for questions. But be honest, when somebody asks you a question, you don’t have an answer. It’s okay to say, I don’t know. Let me figure it out. Or let’s have a discussion. That’s, that’s a lot of the fun of a meet up is just the discussions with whoever’s presenting and having a back and forth discussing what they presented on. It’s a lot of fun.

Eric Van Johnson
Yeah, I agree. Completely agree. All right, what else you got? I want to talk about sponsors.

John Congdon
Yeah, you do that there was something else I was gonna bring up there and I forgot what it was. So as you’re talking about sponsors, maybe I’ll think about it.

Eric Van Johnson
Okay. So we do have some sponsors at Tech. We’re hoping to get more we’re actually kind of in flight with a few other people. One, I’m excited about all of them, but there’s one in particular I’m very excited about. But info VIP is a gold sponsor. I think we’d already talked about foam burner. Platform sh i don’t think They were on board the last time we recorded they are now a bronze sponsor. We’re very excited about them. And then I was in my in Laravel were like two of the first sponsors of text. So they are still with us. Believe it or not.

John Congdon
Like I said, lots of other pokers in the fire hat or whatever that stares

Eric Van Johnson
holes in the fire. Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s again, knowing me, I overshare I hate the whole like, like, teasing aspect of marketing. I don’t like the whole teasing piece. But this is not teasing this is we don’t have contracts in place. So we can’t discuss yet but Right.

John Congdon
Just some goes little those little things.

Eric Van Johnson
Yeah. All the legalities of it.

John Congdon
Yeah, that’s, that’s part of the pain in the butt with running our businesses dealing with all of that, like, I just want to do the work. It’s all I care about. Oh, that’s what I wanted to bring up. The team I work on. So we, we do consulting work for other companies. And oftentimes, we kind of get embedded into another company’s team. And that’s kind of where I’m at. With the HP architect. I’m kind of embedded on one of our clients teams. So they have a larger team, like 1213 devs. And I’m one of them. And if you want an idea of how to use our magazine, start a book club, we do it twice a month, the first and third Monday of the month, the whole group gets together and zoom, we’ve pre selected one article out of one of the magazines around that time, and just have a discussion like a deep dive discussion into that article. Get to talk about the pros and cons what you liked and didn’t like about the author’s take, because the author’s just presenting their viewpoint, right? It doesn’t mean it’s gospel it can be you can say I disagree with them here or I agree with him there. But having that conversation starter is so nice. And being able to to then take whatever that subject matter is and discuss it in the terms of your specific project. So our most recent one was we talked about microservices from Chris tankers, these articles, in turn into such a good conversation. I highly encourage, take this magazine startup, a quote unquote, book club, we call it mag club. Just had discussions. It also connects your mind mind away from, you know, the grind for 30 to 60 minutes.

Eric Van Johnson
Yeah, can I share my user group pack too, of course, we actually had this conversation before. And I had mentioned that the magazine, I talked earlier about user groups, if you have one attended, if you don’t maybe think about starting one, if you had one before, maybe try to get it going again. But one of the biggest challenges of user groups is to a fine speakers in find topics or maybe find topics and find speakers. I don’t care. They’re both difficult. But we make that a little easier. Because you can pick up any edition of PHP architect and get a presentation out of it. Like there’s almost one written for you in the magazine. And so again, you know, maybe it’s maybe it’s a topic you’re not completely familiar with or not completely comfortable with, you read the article kind of gets gets the brain going. And perhaps you do a little bit more research laid out a nice presentation, you’re up and running in very little time I feel and be

John Congdon
clear, we’re not saying plagiarize what the authors have written. It’s take that take that information in, apply it somehow create a presentation around it

I’m sure the authors would love that.

Eric Van Johnson
You brought up something I don’t know if we’ve shared with people, or if people are familiar with this, and I might be actually wrong. But you and I, we had a company before PHP architect, before we started running PHP architect. It was a consulting company and that’s all we did. That’s how we made money. When we started running PHP architect, we made the business decision to merge the consulting company into PHP architect. So if I’m not we will dive deeper. If I’m not mistake in this is the first time PHP architect actually has a consulting group attached to it.

John Congdon
So this goes back to what I mean by I kind of regret it. I love being PHP architect. There’s no two ways about it. But we didn’t have to create its own LLC and then move everything from one LLC to the other PHP architect could have, and probably should have been just a DBA of giga Dev. So you were still a PHP architect employee. There’s just not a separate company, and all the hoops that we had to jump through with bank accounts and switching insurance or health insurance for the employees, moving the employees. All that went into that probably didn’t have to happen in hindsight. And I wish I would have talked to somebody prior to making that decision.

Eric Van Johnson
Oh, is that why you kind of regret it? Because we had to go through all that?

John Congdon
Yeah, it’s just the time, money and stress part that has that took place over a few months, and certain little things that get missed, like, just this past week, I realized, Oh, I never moved our business insurance from the old company to the new company. So now I’m on the phone with them, like, hey, I need I need to change our F EIN and our business name like, well, we need to cancel the old policy and start up a new policy. Okay,

Eric Van Johnson
crazy, man.

John Congdon
So, we start down that process of going through the application. And then they say, Do you have any tangible goods that you sell? Yes, because I’m thinking the elephants. Which is such a small like, non thing of the company. Like there’s no real revenue, nothing to claim.

Eric Van Johnson
Call a tangible good yeah, we sell plushy elephants. Yeah, that’s right. Good.

John Congdon
So this, she starts asking me all these questions. And it’s like, every question, answering correctly or, or, truthfully, there’s like, Oh, now I got all these other questions. I gotta ask. Like, I wish I would have just said no, from the beginning. Like, I don’t feel like I need insurance around these things. It’s like, I need insurance around the business part of it.

Eric Van Johnson
So you regret it because it was work? That wasn’t hearing? Okay. Yeah,

John Congdon
it was I, I think, again, I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a business person outside of owning two businesses right now. I don’t know that it was necessary. And a DBA would have gotten us the same thing we could have had. We could have told people that we were PHP architects, because we would be we could have payments to PHP architect. It just wanted them in separate.

Eric Van Johnson
So what what’s stopping us from flipping the script and say we DBA is Diego Dev and keep all the existing insurances and policies we have?

John Congdon
It’s, well, it’s too late, everything’s pretty much moved. At this point.

Eric Van Johnson
You should have consulted me

John Congdon
and didn’t want to work that way. Because PHP architect LLC is a different F EIN. And that’s what everything seems to use as their, their benchmark. Once you have if you’re if you’re switch Fei ns, and which is Federal employee identification number. It’s like your social security number. But for business, once you switch that, it’s like, oh, you’re not the same company are completely different. So we have to shut down the old one, start up a new one, for whatever it is payroll was was one of them. Insurance.

Eric Van Johnson
Run companies fun. No, it’s done now. So realize the other thing you forgot to change

John Congdon
its bat in there still the fact that the company is still around, because we didn’t do it before the end of the year. Right. So there’s still taxes involved there. They’re still bank accounts, because I don’t want to shut those down yet. There’s, it’s just like, there’s this and this and this. And it’s just like, ah, where does it stop? Yeah. And I don’t want to think about it till after tech.

Eric Van Johnson
Yeah, I don’t think about anything too. After tech. Right, ma’am? So laser focused on tech. So yeah, I gotcha. Gotcha.

John Congdon
All right. Well,

Eric Van Johnson
that was probably a little bit more inside baseball that people care.

John Congdon
We do say bring you the latest insights into the PHP architect magazine conference and more that more being the actual business itself.

Eric Van Johnson
Yeah, the joys and challenges, John and I have, yeah, I’m happy. I tell you I can’t I, I I think I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, like, being PHP architect and it’s so much work. It’s it’s so much work. I don’t mean to keep bitching about it. It’s we’re not pitching. I don’t want anybody to think we’re pitching bad. It’s just, there’s there’s just a lot of work. But it’s so satisfying. It’s so much fun. I enjoy it very much.

John Congdon
I

Eric Van Johnson
could just say I, I can’t stress to you enough. How Absolutely. Taken aback I am with Oscar and how I managed to do this for so long. I just think about that.

John Congdon
I switch over to discord. Just share that, like, I like what you wrote to him is, because it’s true. He did so much. And I think he did it all. 100% himself is, here we are, we’ve got me, you and my wife doing all the same work that he did, and still can’t get it done. Yeah, and he still is. So when we get the rough draft done at the before we release it to everybody, we send it out to the to our writers, and Oscar is one of the writers. And every single time where I think, Okay, I’ve gone through and I found the things he would find. He finds 10 other things. He’s like, Oh, you didn’t do this, and this is wrong. And oh, you should capitalize this. And it’s like, how do you do this? So quick.

Eric Van Johnson
So quickly. After he points it out, it seems so obvious, like how did we miss that? Like, what is your trick? How do you see it?

John Congdon
Well, it doesn’t help that we have been so late. So we were like, alright, just get it done and get it out? Get it done, get it out. Right. That’s kind of been the module the past three months, three, four months, where it’s like, we just need to, we need to get this done as quick as we can because it’s getting so late in the month. I’m hoping we turn a corner here and have that a little more time where we can spend an extra day or two with us going through with a fine tooth comb and not like I mean outsourcing. It’s fine to the to the colonists. They do an awesome job as well. Yes,

Eric Van Johnson
I look forward to ask his feedback. Like, if, if we don’t hear from Oscar, I’m like, maybe we shouldn’t release yet. Wait till you hear something from Oscar. Like it’s not that easy.

John Congdon
That there will be one day where we get one out and he’s like, Well, it looks good. Don’t Don’t I look forward to that day.

Eric Van Johnson
All right. All right. You think?

John Congdon
I think that’s a good one.

Eric Van Johnson
We’re good. Oh, man. All right. Thank

John Congdon
you everyone for hanging out with us. Until next time, keep listening.

Eric Van Johnson
Keep coding. Keep coding.

John Congdon
And keep reading.

PHP podcast, the official podcast of PHP architect, the industry’s leading tech magazine and publisher focused on PHP and web development. Subscribe today at Php arch.com to see what the leaders in the community and industry are talking about.

Air date	March 26, 2023
Hosted by	John Congdon, Eric Van Johnson
Guest(s)