A Recap of 2020

Nuno Maduro | | 5 min read
A Recap of 2020

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.

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:

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:

You can find some more videos here: nunomaduro.com/talks.

Also, I've participated in the following podcasts/live streams:

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.

Pest - An elegant PHP Testing Framework
Introducing Pest: An elegant PHP Testing Framework with a focus on simplicity
Pest - An elegant PHP Testing Framework

This project was released under the Sponsorware license, but quickly got open-sourced and is now licensed under the MIT license.

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. 🤙🏻

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:

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, JiBé 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:

A recap of 2019
The year 2019 is about to end, so I think it’s essential that I take a moment to write down some highlights of mine this year
Nuno MaduroNuno Maduro

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.

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