PHP Tek 2026: Visionary Heads to Chicago

Community  |  Visionary Services, Inc.

PHP Tek 2026: Visionary Heads to Chicago

Every year, Visionary sends developers to PHP Tek, the premier PHP conference in North America. This year, Software Engineers Luke Frazee and Dakota Reid made the trip to Chicago for three days of expert sessions, hands-on workshops, and community connection.

About the Conference

What Is PHP Tek?

PHP Tek is the longest-running, most respected PHP conference in North America, organized by php[architect], a publication that has championed the PHP community for decades. The event is built for working PHP developers who want to sharpen their skills, explore modern best practices, and connect face-to-face with the people shaping the language and its ecosystem.

Sessions cover everything from advanced PHP techniques to modern frameworks and developer tooling, making it relevant whether you're working through a legacy codebase or building greenfield applications with the latest stack.

PHP Tek 2026 returned to Chicago, running May 19–21 with multiple tracks of sessions, workshops, and nightly events all under one roof.

Representing Visionary

Meet Luke and Dakota

Both Luke and Dakota are Software Engineers at Visionary with 11 years of experience at the company, bringing deep familiarity with our work and our clients to everything they learn and bring back.

Luke Frazee Software Engineer, Visionary Services  •  11 Years

PHP Tek is a great opportunity to learn from other experts in the field and experience the PHP community firsthand at its best.

Dakota Reid Software Engineer, Visionary Services  •  11 Years

It's exciting to see the technologies and ideas the industry is moving toward and think about how we can bring those innovations back to the work we do at Visionary.

A Yearly Tradition

Why We Keep Sending Developers

Investing in conferences like PHP Tek isn't just about the sessions, though those are excellent. It's about keeping our team connected to the living, breathing PHP community. The conversations that happen between talks, over lunch, or at the evening networking events are often where the most valuable insights come from.

Sending developers to events like this means our team comes back with fresh perspective, exposure to how other engineering organizations are solving the same problems we face, and relationships with developers they can learn from long after the conference ends.