As folks who've attended @merge probably already know, we're back for 2025! Mark your calendars (and buy your Blind Bird tickets at https://longhornphp.com) for Thursday-Saturday, October 23-25 at Holiday Inn Austin Midtown, and submit your presentation topics to https://cfp.longhornphp.com.

We're excited to bring the conference back for our sixth (and PHP's 30th) year, and hope all y'all will join us, in-person or online.

"""Checking whether an array is empty with a strict comparison against the empty array is a common pattern in PHP. A GitHub search for "=== []" language:PHP reveals 44k hits. From the set of !$a, count($a) === 0, empty($a) and $a === [] it however is also the slowest option."""

https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/18571

This is a great example of how you should write whatever you find most readable and maintainable, and let us worry about efficiency. Wtih this PR, the "slow" approach becomes a "fast" one.

In my twenties, I was denied a medically necessary hysterectomy because I “might meet a man who wants kids”

I fought for years to get the surgery, spending weeks out of every month stuck in a hospital bed needing iron and blood transfusions. Too disabled to work. Fainting almost daily. In constant pain.

No matter how sick I got, the hypothetical future husband and baby came before my health. What these imaginary beings might want was more important than what I needed.

When I finally had the surgery, I had a severe post operative complication. The surgeon didn’t believe me. She sent me home.

I had to go to the ER four times before they found the life threatening internal bleed. Each time dismissing me as “attention seeking” or accusing me of not understanding some pain was to be expected.

My then boyfriend saved my life. He got loud and refused to take me home, saying he was convinced I would die.

It turns out, he was right. I had a giant bleed in my belly and an infected abscess that had been growing for weeks while they gaslit and ignored me.

It was a hell of a crash course in medical misogyny, as well as the need to always have an advocate in healthcare settings:

https://medium.com/@thedisabledginger/what-my-hysterectomy-taught-me-about-medical-misogyny-and-advocacy-e7d6e7294af8

#misogyny #disability #chronicillness #patriarchy #womenshealth #disability #obgyn #hysterectomy #childfree #medicalmisogyny #disabilityjustice