Best of stitcher.io — January 2026

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   Article

   stitcher.io·18w

   Processing 11 million rows in minutes instead of hours

   A developer optimized their blog's analytics system to process 11 million events, improving performance from 30 to 14,000 events per second through systematic changes: removing unnecessary database sorting, reversing nested loops, ditching the ORM for raw queries, replacing closures with while loops, fixing framework serialization overhead, and using indexed ID-based pagination instead of offsets. The rebuild time dropped from 50 hours to 10 minutes per projector.

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2. 2
   Article

   stitcher.io·19w

   PHP in 2026

   PHP 8.5 brings the pipe operator, clone with parameters, closures in attributes, and fatal error backtraces. Partial function application is coming in PHP 8.6, enabling cleaner pipe operator usage. Pattern matching is under discussion. FrankenPHP, a Go-based runtime offering 10% performance gains, is gaining traction with PHP Foundation support. Mago, a Rust-based linter/formatter/analyzer, reached stable release. Async PHP development continues through multiple RFC iterations. PHPverse online conference returns in 2026, and the Tempest framework is preparing its third major release with 80+ contributors.

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