The year 2020 is about to end, so I think it's essential that I take a moment to write down some highlights of mine this year.
Joined Laravel
On July 20th - 2020 was my first day at Laravel. It's been 5 months now, and couldn't be happier about this move. Felt very welcomed from the first day, and the projects are very exciting.
After two years, this is my last week at @algolia. Grateful to have worked alongside so many brilliant minds - I'll miss you, buddies.
— Nuno Maduro π (@enunomaduro) July 13, 2020
Next, I'm delighted to announce that I'll be joining the @laravelphp team starting next week. π₯³
My job at Laravel is mainly around the products Forge and Vapor. Besides handling support and doing general maintenance, here are some features I've worked on:
- Vapor: Support for RDS Proxies
- Forge: Automatically Email Invoices
- Vapor: Support For API Gateway 2.0
- Vapor: Support For PHP 8.0 Runtime
- Vapor: Support For EU (Milan) Region
- Vapor: Support For Customize Default Role
- Forge: Better Troubleshooting With Solutions
- Vapor: Support For New UI Dashboard Package
- Vapor: Amazon Linux 2 Runtimes Are Now Available
- Vapor: Support For Serving Assets From The Root Domain
- Vapor: Support For Load Balancer Security Policy Updates
- Vapor: Improve Debugging Hooks And Β Deployments From The CI
Besides, also a big win in these 5 months is being comfortable with the AWS ecosystem and Vapor. Just like Forge, Vapor is a Laravel application written in the Laravel way. Yet, the concepts around the usage of AWS by Vapor were completely new to me.
Made Public Speaking
As usual, I've made public speaking around my open source projects. Especially about PEST, which was my recent big open source project. Of course, due to the travel restrictions, the events were online:
- πͺπΈ Laracon EU
- π§π· DarkMira Tour
- π§π· PHP Community Summit
- π³π± Full-stack Utrecht Meetup
- π Freek Van der Herten's livestream - Now "Laravel Worldwide Meetup"
You can find some more videos here: nunomaduro.com/talks.
Also, I've participated in the following podcasts/live streams:
- π Laravel Podcast
- π Voices of the ElePHPant
- πΉ Algolia Live Coding Sessions
- πΉ Laravel Portugal
- πΉ Laravel Internals
- πΉ Live PHPRS
- πΉ Danielhe4rt
Released PEST
Aside from public speaking, my main hobby is open source. Early this year, I launched my most successful open source project in my career: PEST - An elegant PHP Testing framework with a focus on simplicity. Carefully crafted to bring the joy of testing to PHP.

This project was released under the Sponsorware license, but quickly got open-sourced and is now licensed under the MIT license.
π Goal reached: 75 @github sponsors. And as promised, @pestphp is now open-source and available for everyone.
— Nuno Maduro π (@enunomaduro) May 20, 2020
β Documentation: https://t.co/E4BRxvAu1g.
β Source code: https://t.co/EVkbPuTGQn.
Hope you enjoy this minimal & elegant PHP testing framework! π
PEST has already around 2k stars on Github, 200k downloads on Packagist, a PHPStorm Plugin, and it was mentioned in important websites and newsletters such as Laravel News, JetBrains Blog, and more.

Releasing this project makes me particularly happy as releasing a big framework in PHP as a goal for me in 2020:
My recap in 2019: In my free time, I genuinely want to dedicate an entire year to find and build something that leaves my mark in PHP history. It can be a superset, a framework, or other projects. The most important, it needs to be something that brings me joy and a fun journey.
Of course, multiple people have contributed to PEST so far, including my long-time buddies Owen Voke and Oliver Nybroe.

A huge thanks to everyone who helped make PEST possible. π€π»
Got into PHP Source Code
To be honest, I wasn't expecting this one - but in 2020, I've also dived into the PHP Source Code. During this journey, the goal was just to understand how the language I use works behind the scenes.
I've compiled a list of resources while I was learning the details, and I've also made my first pull request that adds multi-line short closures:
I've just made my first pull request to the core of PHP: support for multi-line arrow functions! π₯³
— Nuno Maduro π (@enunomaduro) October 1, 2020
Of course, this pull request will be followed by an RFC in the next couple of days. ππ»
Pull request: https://t.co/3H1MofPyHA. π pic.twitter.com/Ht0vhTBwQA
Just like every new proposal for the PHP language, the addition of this feature to PHP 8.1 is currently being discussed by the internals mailing list: externals.io/message/111991. Yet, the community reaction to the pull request was just awesome:

Maintained Multiple Open Source Projects
Finally, and as usual, I've dedicated some of my free time to maintain the multiple open source projects I've created during my career: Laravel Zero, Collision, PHP Insights, Larastan, and more.
Of course, maintaining all those codebases alone wouldn't be possible - so I am very thankful to multiple people that help me: Owen Voke, Oliver Nybroe, Caneco, JiBΓ© Barth, Can Vural, and many others!
Looking ahead to 2021
At Laravel, I would like to spend most of my time making Forge and Vapor even better products. Both are already my favorite solutions to deploy Laravel applications, yet there is still space to improve.
In my free time, I would like to create some educational content around PEST, and just keep making PEST better.
Finally, next year I also will move to Portugal - so probably I will spend some time finding a new place for my family.
That's it for 2020. Be sure to check my recap from 2019:

Other recaps
Want to read some more recaps? Here you go!
Let me know a link to your recap, and I'll include it in the list above.