PHP is inundated with "MVC frameworks" of various shapes and sizes. It's such a buzzword that recruiters use it to mean "separation of concerns." But... are any of them actually doing Model-View-Controller?

It turns out, no. In fact, MVC does not exist on the server-side. We've been doing it wrong all this time!

But fear not: we can still write good, decoupled, separated-concerns code on the backend. The patterns are there, many of them good, but we should recognize them for what they are.

In this session we'll explore what MVC actually means, how its meaning got twisted, alternative models like Action-Domain-Responder, and how to actually think about server-side web architecture. Hint: It's not at all the same as front-end or desktop.