A recap of 2022
As the year comes to a close, it is a natural time to reflect on the events and experiences of the past twelve months. In this blog post, I would like to share some of the highlights of my year and offer some thoughts on what the future may hold.
At a Personal level
At a personal level, I’ve made a big achievement: I finally got the courage and went to the gym, and lost 44 pounds (20 kg). This was due to hiring a personal coach and going to the gym five to six times a week. In addition to proper nutrition, that is key for these sorts of things.
Traveling has always been a passion of mine. Late in 2021, I took a trip to New York, but this year 2022, I was able to make trips to Los Angeles and Canada - and gosh, those were great trips. In addition, I went to the biggest festival in the US: Coachella.
Did you know that I am an extrovert? Yes, I am! However, after moving to Lisbon, I was not able to reach out in real life to many people. Thanks to the idea of starting a local meetup here, we have reached the conclusion that there are a lot of people with the same interests as me, and I have made a lot of new friends that have allowed me to boost my happiness and reduce stress when I am not working. Best idea ever!
Open Source
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Pest has just crossed 3.8 million downloads! This is 3 times more than in January 2022. This is great news, as it shows that people are trusting Pest as a solid testing foundation for their projects and ideas. In addition, to support Pest’s running costs, we ended December crossing $1,200 MRR on GitHub sponsors.
Together with Sandro Gehri, I have released github.com/openai-php/client: a supercharged PHP API client that allows you to interact with the OpenAI API. This project reached nearly 1,000 GitHub stars in a couple of months, and is aiming to make OpenAI development in PHP more productive.
Also, small to me, but big for my family: I was interviewed by a local newspaper (Jornal de Leiria) due to my open-source endeavors.
As a small note, also got familiar with Rust - the programming language everyone talks about recently. On this, I’ve released my first Rust project: github.com/wena-cli/wena.
Public Speaking
In early 2022, I have decided to stop making online conferences. This decision is based on the fact that I have very little enjoyment while preparing and giving online talks. However, in May, I attended my first physical conference since the Covid pandemic and spoke about Pest at PHP Day (Italy).
Additionally, I have created a community meet-up in Lisbon called PHP Lisbon. We have held three meet-ups and have one scheduled for next year.
At Laravel level
We have started the year by releasing Laravel 9.x, and almost all of the built-in Artisan commands have been completely reimagined to provide a better experience. In addition to helping Artisan improve, I have also worked on many new features and speed enhancements - including a brand new package called Laravel Pint, which reached 5,000,000 downloads in just a couple of months. At the end of the year, we began preparing Laravel 10.x, which includes the use of native type hints on user-land code throughout the entire organization.
On Forge & Vapor, the team and I have shipped many features! In particular, I had a lot of fun developing the brand new Vapor onboarding process with Joe Dixon; it combines a perfect GitHub integration with three visual steps for getting started with Vapor.
At Laravel, we also have our own documentary: “Laravel Origins” by OfferZen. I participated in some of the footage, and even Pest PHP had their own small highlight: youtube.com/watch?v=TdtJluPnl6E
Looking Forward
2023 is an exciting time for me! After twelve months of hard work, I will finally be releasing Pest 2.x and I’m so excited to see the community reaction. It’s been a long journey (for the entire Pest team) and I can’t wait to see what the future holds.
My public speaking plans for 2023, at least for now, include speaking at Laravel EU, PHP UK Conference, Laracon India, and phptek (Chicago). I’m looking forward to meeting lots of new people and having fun again with my conference buddies.
Finally, I’d like to become incredibly skilled at producing amazing, high-quality videos on YouTube. I won’t lie, it’s something that I keep delaying to learn, as it is something I am not comfortable with. However, next year, I don’t want to delay this anymore. Count on you to motivate me!
2023 is shaping up to be an amazing year! I’m insanely excited about the Laravel ecosystem. Laravel v10, Pest v2, Livewire v3, PHP v8.2, conferences are back - wow! Thank you for supporting my journey and being by my side. See you in 2023!
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. If yes, please consider supporting my work — my mission is to spend more time maintaining the dozens of projects that I've written/collaborated on over the years and continue developing new projects to make PHP development more productive and enjoyable.