Mike Lopez
Writing
I’ll be honest: some days I open my terminal with the noble intention of being productive… and five minutes later I’m somehow watching a video titled “Top 10 Times a Goat Won an Argument.” On Linux. Inside Brave. While Slack sits in the background wondering where its life went wrong. If you’re a Linux user,
Use a practical AI workflow for WordPress plugin development that improves planning, code generation, code review, and overall code quality.
What I learned from vibe coding an internal PHP application with AI, including planning, review, speed gains, and where human judgment still mattered.
A practical look at vibe coding, how AI changes software development, and what developers and hiring managers should pay attention to next.
Refactor legacy PHP safely with characterization tests, static analysis, small reversible changes, and concrete before-and-after examples.
If you told 25-year-old me that one day I’d be managing a team of PHP developers, reviewing performance metrics, and negotiating deadlines with stakeholders, I probably would’ve laughed and gone back to refactoring some poorly written legacy class. I didn’t start my career with “leadership” in mind—my focus was all about clean code, fast queries,
See how to optimize large PHP codebases safely by profiling hot paths, isolating risky changes, fixing repeated queries, and improving performance incrementally.
A practical look at hiring PHP developers in 2025, including what signals matter, what I ignore, and how I evaluate remote candidates.
Manage a high-performing PHP team with clearer priorities, leaner workflows, better communication, and less process overhead.
Understand eager loading in PHP ORMs, how it fixes the N+1 query problem, when to use it, and when eager loading can hurt performance.
