Why we created PHP Reads
02 March 2026 · Stefan Priebsch & Sebastian Bergmann
We feel that blogging is coming back. After years in which the short post and the social thread crowded out longer writing, developers are starting to publish proper articles again, with reasoning, code, and conclusions you can actually use.
At the same time, the volume of content that is not worth reading has never been higher. AI-generated articles fill search results and feed aggregators with text that is fluent, confident, and almost entirely without substance. Finding the writing that actually matters has become harder, not easier.
The PHP community has always had good writers. It is currently lacking a reliable way to surface the best of what they produce. Good articles appear, circulate briefly among the people who happened to be online that day, and then quietly disappear into archives that nobody searches.
In February 2026, Stefan asked on LinkedIn whether there was interest in an ads-free and tracking-free curated list of blog posts. The overwhelming response made the case plainly: someone should be paying attention and pointing to the work that deserves a wider audience.
PHP Reads is our attempt to do that. Every week, we select three articles from across the PHP community, posts that reward careful reading, that contain something you did not already know, or that make a familiar problem look different. We sign each pick individually and say briefly why we chose it.
The selection is deliberate and opinionated. We are not aggregating everything; we are pointing to the pieces we consider worth your time. Nothing appears here because a vendor submitted it, because it is optimised for search engines, or because it was generated to fill a content calendar. It appears because one of us read it and thought: this one deserves to be found.
PHP Reads are currently available on this website. We will offer an RSS feed next, and then a plain text email newsletter with no tracking of any kind. It is a free service to the PHP community and will remain free forever.