Hi

Today we released the first beta version of Tempest, the framework that I've been working on together with a bunch of other people for the past two years. It's a pretty exciting milestone because it's the last step before a stable 1.0 release.

Two years ago, Tempest started out as an educational project during one of my livestreams. Since then, we've had 56 people contribute to the framework, merged 591 pull requests, resolved 455 issues, and have written around 50k lines of code. Two contributors joined the core team and dedicated a lot of their time to help make Tempest into something real. And today, we're tagging Tempest as beta.

We have to be real though: we won't get it perfect from the start. Tempest is now in beta, which means we don't plan any breaking changes to stable components anymore, but it also means we expect there to be bugs. And this puts us in an underdog position: why would anyone want to use a framework that has fewer features and likely more bugs than other frameworks?

It turns out, people do see value in Tempest. It's the only reason I decided to work on it in the first place: there is a group of people who want to use it, even when they are aware of its current shortcomings. There is interest in a framework that embraces modern PHP without 10 to 20 years of legacy to carry with it. There is interest in a project that dares to rethink what we've gotten used to over the years. There already is a dedicated community. People already are building with Tempest. Several core members have real use cases for Tempest and are working hard to be able to use it in their own projects as soon as possible. So while Tempest is the underdog, there already seems enough reason for people to use it today.

And I don't want Tempest to remain the underdog. Getting closer to that goal requires getting more people involved. We need hackers to build websites and console applications with Tempest, we need them to run into bugs and edge cases that we haven't thought of. We need entrepreneurs to look into third-party packages, we need to learn what should be improved on our side from their experience. We need people to get involved. That's the next step for Tempest.

Our commitment is that we're doing all we can to make Tempest the best developer experience possible. Tempest is and must stay the framework that truly gets out of your way. Developers need to focus on their code, not on hand-holding and guiding the framework. We're still uncertain about a handful of features and have clearly marked them as experimental, with tried and tested alternatives in place. We're committed to a period of bug fixing to make sure Tempest can be trusted when we release the 1.0 version.

I have to say, I'm very excited for what's to come, and I'm glad you're here to share in that excitement. Don't hesitate to reply to this email if you have any questions or feedback, I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

Until next time

Brent