Hi

Happy new year! I had a great time off, and now picking up a lot of things again. January is a bit of a chaotic month for me, as I'll be on an internal company gathering for a whole week, and heading to Laracon EU (OK, technically that's in February). Still, I have some exciting things to share with you!

Version stats

As usual in January, I take a look at how PHP is doing. I look at Packagist data, as well as the top-1000 most popular PHP packages. I bundle my findings in a blog post, which has just been released, you can check it out here: https://stitcher.io/blog/php-version-stats-january-2025.

Start with DX

I also felt inspired to write a short blogpost about framework design — these kinds of posts now go onto the Tempest blog. You can read it here, and I'm really curious to hear your thoughts: https://tempestphp.com/blog/start-with-the-customer-experience/.

Tempest

Finally, I want to give you an update about Tempest: given that January is a chaotic month, I've postposed the release of alpha.5 for another two weeks. Once again, there are a lot of cool features, and I'm looking forward to sharing them. However, there are some fine tunings to do still, especially in regard to PHP 8.4 support. You can follow the progress here: https://github.com/tempestphp/tempest-framework.

Sponsors

I don't talk about sponsors or financial stuff that often, but it's the start of a new year, and I wanted to take the opportunity to mention it once more. If you're with a company looking for sponsor opportunities on stitcher.io, or if you're looking for ways to help me with my open source projects: you can! Hit reply, and I'm happy to provide you with more info :)

That's it for this edition, I'll see you in the next one!

Brent

PS: let me know if you're coming to Laracon EU, I'd love to meet as many people as possible 🤩