Why we still write PHP in 2026

Once a quarter, a designer friend asks why we\'re still writing PHP. The answer is unromantic: every time we\'ve costed a rebuild on something more fashionable, the maintenance numbers have made the case to stay where we are.

We ship for clients who, in five years, will need to push a typo fix without us. PHP runs on shared hosting they probably already have. There\'s no build pipeline to break. There\'s no Node version to argue with. The intern they hired last summer can read the templates without a primer.

None of this is a take. It\'s just that the cost of clever tooling is borne by people who aren\'t in the room when we choose it. We try to remember that on every kickoff.

What we do invest in: opinionated linting, a small set of conventions, and a deployment script that\'s the same for every project. That\'s where the hours go — not into picking a new framework every January.