The Laravel News site has posted an announcement about the latest in their series of Laracon events: Laracon Online 2019.

Laracon Online 2019 is coming to a couch near you on March 6th, 2019! Back and better than ever in this 2019 edition, you will hear from the likes of Laravel creator Taylor Otwell, Tighten Partner and Laracon US speaker Matt Stauffer, Refactoring UI tag-team Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger, Laracon US speakers Freek Van Der Herten and Samantha Geitz, and Laracon 2018 EU speaker Marcel Pociot.

Just like last year, the event is hosted entirely online and the event is super affordable for the early bird price of $12. No hotels, no airfare, just signup and spend the day watching some of the best speakers right from your computer.

And there's good news for those out there wanting to attend the event - they're giving away 355 tickets for free based on the generous donations from several sponsors. Naturally, if you can afford the $12 (that's like 2 cups of fancy coffee!) then don't enter the drawing. They want as many people as possible to enjoy the event. If you're interested in the kind of content presented at these events, check out last year's talks or just head over and get your ticket now.

On the main PHP.net site they've announced the first stable release in the PHP 7.3.x series: PHP 7.3.0!

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 7.3.0. This release marks the third feature update to the PHP 7 series.

PHP 7.3.0 comes with numerous improvements and new features such as:

• Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc Syntax
• PCRE2 Migration
• Multiple MBString Improvements
• LDAP Controls Support
• Improved FPM Logging
• Windows File Deletion Improvements
• Several Deprecations

You can find out more information about these features and view the Changelog for this release from the announcement. As always, you can download this latest release from either the main downloads page or windows.php.net for the Windows binaries. If you need more information on moving to this new release, check out the migration guide.

On the Laravel News site, they've posted the announcement of the release of the results from their 2018 edition of the Laravel Survey.

We partner with LaraJobs to run an annual Laravel survey to see what types of projects people are taking on with Laravel as well as get some feedback on what the Laravel community could be doing better. The results ended up with over 1,500 submissions, and some interesting insights.

You can see the complete results on this 2018 Laravel Survey Results page and thanks for everyone who took the time to fill it out.

Questions asked in this year's survey included topics such as why they selected Laravel, size of projects, if they're able to find the developers they need and what they'd like to see more of in the Larvel community (tutorials, articles, regional conferences, etc).

The folks over at RIPSTech, a PHP-focused security company, have posted the announcement about the latest edition of their PHP Security Advent Calendar. This is the third year they've done this and it's always interesting and fun to find out about some of the vulnerabilities that can lie hidden in everyday PHP code.

The holiday season is coming up again and it’s time for some security fun. For the third time in a row, we are proud to announce our PHP security advent calendar. This year, we will analyze 24 exciting security bugs that we detected in the most widespread WordPress plugins.

In our first calendar edition in 2016, we analyzed exceptional vulnerabilities in some of the most popular open source PHP applications. Last year, we released 24 PHP security challenges with a hidden security pitfall in every day’s code challenge. This year we would like to give once again something back to the great PHP and Infosec community and release another advent calendar with 24 security surprises.

While you can't start on the calendar just yet (as of this post it's only November 28th) it will be coming soon. Be sure to sign up for their newsletter to get updates on when it's officially launched.

According to a new post on the Laravel News site, the date and venue for this 2019 edition of the Laracon conference have been announced. This next event will be happening in New York City in July of next year!

Laracon VII is coming to Playstation Theater in Times Square, NYC on July 24th-25th, 2019! Taylor Otwell made the announcement today with a sweet laracon.us website by Jack McDade.

They haven't posted any information about speakers or tickets yet but if you sign up for their mailing list you'll be notified as soon as there's an update. If you're interested in sessions that have been presented at previous Laracon conferences, check out the videos from the 2018 conference featuring speakers such as Freek Van der Herten, Jason McCreary, TJ Miller, and Laravel creator Taylor Otwell.

On the Laravel News site they have a post about the Laravel Telescope beta that's just been announced. Laravel Telescope is an introspection and debugging tool that integrates with your Laravel application to provide details gathered during execution and issues along the way.

The first beta release of Laravel Telescope is now out and available for everyone. If you are not familiar with Telescope here is the quick overview:

Laravel Telescope is an elegant debug assistant for the Laravel framework. Telescope provides insight into the requests coming into your application, exceptions, log entries, database queries, queued jobs, mail, notifications, cache operations, scheduled tasks, variable dumps and more. Telescope makes a wonderful companion to your local Laravel development environment.

You can get the beta by installing it through Composer.

You install it the same way you'd install any other Laravel package via a composer require for laravel/telescope and run the installation and migration steps using the artisan command. This tool is only for Laravel applications and is tightly integrated with the tool. For more information on Telescope, check out its GitHub repository.

Blackfire.io, the PHP performance profiling service, has announced a series of webinars aimed to help you learn more about the service and how it can help you get the most out of your code. These webinars are spread out all across the globe so anyone can attend at a timezone-appropriate hour.

Here's the list for the October and November sessions:

• [Getting Started with Blackfire (October 30th, 2018 – US Session)](Getting Started with Blackfire (October 30th, 2018 – US Session))
• Getting Started with Blackfire (October 30th, 2018 – European Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 6th, 2018 – US Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 6th, 2018 – European Session)
• Introduction to Blackfire (November 13th, 2018 – US Session)
• Introduction to Blackfire (November 13th, 2018 – European Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 20th, 2018 – US Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 20th, 2018 – European Session)
• Getting Started with Blackfire (November 21st, 2018 – Asian Session)

You can find out more about the contents of each sessions - "Getting Started with Blackfire", "Introduction to Blackfire" and "Automating Performance Testing with Blackfire" - by clicking on the link for the related event. If you're interested at all in improving the performance of your application, check one of these webinars out. Blackfire offers their "Hack" level of support to try out for free too so there's no reason not to give it a shot!

An announcement has been posted by KnpUniversity today under the group's new name: SymfonyCasts.

If you look around the site today, you'll probably notice something different. KnpUniversity is now SymfonyCasts! And SymfonyCasts is the official online training system for Symfony. This is something we've been planning for awhile and we are beyond excited. Like, jumping-high-fives-someone-order-a-big-cake kind of excited! Woh.

If you're already a KnpU/SymfonyCasts user: we <3 you! And because of that, I want to explain exactly what this change means (and doesn't mean).

They start by answering the first questions most have about changes and if they acquired. They also talk about why they're making the change and how the focus will still remain on high-quality Symfony-related tutorials and videos. With them joining the Symfony family officially, though, it provides them with support to keep the lessons coming and the help they'll provide on the Symfony documentation as a part of the changes.

In a new post to the Laravel News site, they've shared the announcement about the release of the first Release Candidate for PHP 7.3.x: PHP 7.3.0RC1.

PHP 7.3 is inching closer to general release (planned for December), with today’s announcement of the first PHP 7.3 release candidate:

The post also shares the upcoming timeline for the releases leading up to PHP 7.3.0 (stable) with the first beta release planned for November 20th. They also list out (and link to more information) for some of the features coming in 7.3 including:

• Trailing Commas in function calls
• Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc syntax
• list() reference assignment

On the Symfony blog they've posted the second part of their announcement about the speakers that will be presenting at the SymfonyCon Lisbon conference in December.

We announced last Monday the first part of the conference schedule for SymfonyCon Lisbon 2018. We’re now very happy to announce the second part of the schedule. Discover the conference schedule! We’re extremely pleased to welcome the following speakers (in alphabetical order) and their talks at the conference.

Speakers and sessions in this announcement include:

• Pedro Magalhães: "Changing PHP"
• Jeremy Mikola: "Bulletproof MongoDB"
• Michelle Sanver: "Using the Workflow component for e-commerce"
• Miro Svrtan: "When Testing Makes No Sense"

They'll also be joined by Symfony creator and project lead Fabien Potencier with an opening keynote.