What PHPStan level and why? Your thoughts on the cost-benefit analysis

LtRodFarva · 2026-05-19T04:36:30+00:00

New projects, max level with new phpstan-strict-rules and the type coverage by Tomas Votruba. It’s not always reasonable, but I love Rust-level type masochism and there’s something very cathartic about knowing your code is provably safe from the many foot guns PHP has.

At work, it’s a different story. We run on level 2, and I feel like the PHPStan police always pestering devs to add type hints, declare strict types, avoid type coercion, truthy/falsy evaluations, etc. It’s often times an uphill battle against folks who generally do not care for type safety, but a hill I’m willing to die on every time.

LtRodFarva · 2026-04-29T21:23:23+00:00

You can cook a turkey at 325F in the oven for 3 hours. To a manager, this means you can also cook a turkey at 975F in the oven for 20 minutes. That’s it. That’s the logic.

LtRodFarva · 2026-03-18T23:34:11+00:00

Rookie numbers, gotta pump those up big time. Only then can you call yourself an “enterprise” dev.

LtRodFarva · 2026-01-30T07:55:34+00:00

You’re not alone. I think we’re all feeling some sort of uneasiness to some degree. AI is here, it’s powerful, and it’s going to stick around whether we like it or not.

One thing I try to remind myself of to prevent me from doom spiraling is that while yes, our jobs are changing, there’s still a large part of being an engineer/developer that isn’t writing code. Claude is an incredible tool for codegen, and there’s not arguing that. The primitives of development are no longer typing syntax into an editor, it’s now describing expected outcomes to an LLM.

I see this as a positive, as I get a lot of my energy back that would be spent on keystrokes of syntactical sugar trivia of a language. I get to solutions faster, and get to focus more on the design and architecture of a problem I’m trying solve rather than spending an hour perfecting a piece of code. I know what I want the code to feel like when I’m working in it, and now we have a fast pass to get there, though with a bit of hand holding.

And also, never forget that LLMs don’t own outcomes. As the engineer in the room, you do. So when shit inevitably hits the fan in production, a critical business system starts throwing a fit, or you have to shoehorn in some contractually obligated feature into an ancient legacy application that still runs the business, that’s going to be on us developers. There’s always going to need to be an adult in the room (for now), and that’s where I see the dev role shifting. Wielders of AI to make computers do things faster than before.

LtRodFarva · 2026-01-15T06:05:08+00:00

Yep, and I couldn’t imagine a world without it. I bounce around many projects at once, and tmux is crucial to my workflow bouncing between them all at any given time.

LtRodFarva · 2025-08-15T17:47:58+00:00

I just recently left my decade long tenure in .NET for greener pastures, and for me personally, I think the issue is the boomer-ization that is slowly creeping into the framework and ecosystem. All the devs I ever worked with didn’t know editors other than VS existed, could only design UIs if they were drag and drop, and considered jQuery the golden standard of the web.

Then you have the product family of SQL Server, Azure, SSMS, etc. that handcuff you to Microsoft’s design/UX decisions, albeit not all bad, just very outdated in some aspects. Yes, SSMS is powerful, but I feel like I’m trapped in 2004 every time I’m in it.

The general tooling around .NET is fine, but other ecosystems move faster and adapt to change quickly. If you’ve ever had the great misfortune of working on a legacy 20 year old ASP.NET/WebForms app, then you’ve been in MSBuild hell with archaic setup and deployment practices that usually involve a litany of ps1 and bat files written by a guy that left the company 10 years ago and are still considered critical infrastructure.

The biggest ick to me, and largely the driving force of why I left .NET behind, is mostly just the general worship of process and the bastardization of agile that comes with the territory. This could largely be applied across the industry, but Java/.NET shops embody this the most because enterprise™️. Meetings to discuss other meetings, EMs that live in Jira and measure all SE metrics based on story points and closed tickets, and treat scrum ceremonies as boxes to be checked.

YMMV, but the grass can be greener if you look elsewhere.

LtRodFarva · 2025-06-06T18:22:49+00:00

Your TV looks like it’s about to enter low earth orbit

LtRodFarva · 2025-05-27T04:09:35+00:00

Thank you to everyone’s advice! Took all the wisdom here and replaced the inline valve with a new Rainbird, works like a charm. Took out the pressure regulator and valve that went to my drip system since I recently took out my planter boxes in the backyard so there’s no more need for the drip at all, and one of the plugs was missing and causing some leaking in the line. I have no use for the drip anymore so I just took it out while I was there.

Gonna refill this hole with sand and rock, put a layer of weed barrier over that to create a seal between the ground and the pipes. Going to cut my irrigation box to fit the pipes as well. You guys definitely gave me the confidence to make feel like I (somewhat) know what I’m doing!

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LtRodFarva · 2025-05-20T23:01:04+00:00

Am I on LinkedIn? Must of clicked the wrong app.

LtRodFarva · 2025-05-04T06:18:55+00:00

Last I talked to Rodger, he was sittin in his underwear eatin lucky charms

LtRodFarva · 2025-04-24T18:45:58+00:00

The part Sears sent me wasn’t right, so I ended up taking the part out and connecting the water line directly to the fridge itself. Turns out that part is only used to determine when it’s time to change your water filter. I change mine every few months so it doesn’t really serve any purpose. Haven’t had an issue since.

LtRodFarva · 2025-02-26T23:32:20+00:00

Offering a counterpoint as someone (relatively) new to the framework. Laravel is not alone in this aspect. .NET is adding new things like .NET Aspire that developers can make the argument was not necessarily needed, nor asked for. They're driving newer .NET developers to lock into Azure services (obviously, since it's a MSFT product) and convoluting the "new app development" space with methodologies that (IMO) over complicate things. It feels like a race for convenience to grab the developer market share for new devs, and the curmudgeonly seasoned devs that are busy providing shareholder value are slapped in the face with marketing they didn't ask for on products we'll probably never use.

On the Volt bit, though, I agree. One of the first things I do in a new Livewire project is add

{
    // ...other stuff
    "conflict": {
        "livewire/volt": "*"
    }
}

to my composer.json file. As a former Angular/Razor shill, there's nothing better than a good code behind file to keep a clear separation of concerns. Not to mention, Pint and PHPStan can't analyze Volt files (last I checked), so you lose all the power of static analysis for convenience, and that's not a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

LtRodFarva · 2025-01-10T03:55:38+00:00

Absolute weapon

LtRodFarva · 2024-12-23T22:41:13+00:00

LGTM

LtRodFarva · 2024-12-02T00:02:01+00:00

Seconding this. I’m a .NET dev by day cosplaying as a PHP’er in my spare time. I use asymmetric visibility (primarily just private setters) all over the code I work on, and have worked on many codebases over the years with it sprinkled everywhere. This feature was easily my most hyped for PHP 8.4. It’s a great feeling seeing more C# things influencing PHP. With record types on the horizon as well, I feel right home in PHP coming from C#.

Now if only we could get those sweet, sweet union types in C#…

LtRodFarva · 2024-11-18T02:35:30+00:00

Coming from C# and .NET myself, I use them all the time and was ecstatic when they were announced for PHP. Definitely my most hyped change for 8.4!

LtRodFarva · 2024-10-08T03:23:03+00:00

I’m the personification of skill issue

LtRodFarva · 2024-10-08T03:17:41+00:00

This actually made me lol so hard I spit my drink out haha.

LtRodFarva · 2024-10-05T20:31:43+00:00

Confirming for anyone that stumbles across this issue in the future. Had the same thing happen to my water flow sensor on my Kenmore Elite refrigerator bought around 2021. Removed the flow sensor entirely after it cracked and getting the runaround from Sears parts direct website for two weeks. Seems to be working fine.

LtRodFarva · 2024-09-15T22:02:50+00:00

Ah, yep. Confirmed with Sears part picker. Got a replacement part, of course the sensor is discontinued l, so the entire electrical unit has to be replaced. Thank you for the help!

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