With the advent of the PSR-7 standard, middleware has become a household name in the PHP ecosystem. This talk will cover middleware architecture concepts including a comparison of how middleware is being used in PHP versus other languages. We'll look at how to leverage middleware concepts to build applications from scratch as well as combine off-the-shelf components using middleware as the glue. Of course, we'll also look at some downright dirty tricks that middleware lets you get away with as well.