Hi

You're subscribed to this mailing list, meaning you probably know me, and this probably won't come as a surprise but…

I love PHP!

What a great language it is, especially these days! Today I published a post that's becoming a yearly tradition: PHP in 2024. I'd love for you to read it, and — more importantly — to hear from you what you are most excited about for PHP this year? Just hit reply and let me know!

For me, the highlights are the PHP Foundation kicking it into higher gear with now 10 developers hired, FrankenPHP is pretty cool, and I especially liked people outside the PHP community discovering how awesome a language and ecosystem it actually is.

Let me know your input!

I also wanted to point you to a new video I published today, a behind the scenes look of how I built tempest/highlight — which I wrote about in the previous email.

You can check out the video here, I hope you enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZugbAR8Fyg.

Lastly, I wanted to mention Spatie, the people behind many popular Laravel packages. They are closing into an impressive milestone: their packages have been downloaded almost one billion times. That means that (almost) every one out 100 package downloads with composer, is a Spatie package.

I think that's a great milestone to celebrate, and I feel a tiny bit of pride myself, having worked at Spatie for almost five years, so some of these downloads are code written by me 😁

An upcoming congratulations to Spatie! Thanks for making PHP awesome!

Until next time

Brent