30 years of PHP

10 years ago, I've published my 20 years of PHP blogpost and I think it's the perfect time to reflect about what happened in the last 30 years in the PHP ecosystem.

PHP is still one of the key technologies of my company bitExpert, which we founded in 2003. Over the years, we extended our portfolio and added more technologies, but PHP — and more specifically Symfony — still powers a large portion of our projects.

PHP - the language - is just one side of the coin. We've seen a lot of progress in the language and the whole ecosystem around PHP. Composer and PHPStan had a significant influence on how today's applications are developed. Frameworks like Symfony or Laravel are the foundation for building scalable applications. Alternative runtimes like Roadrunner or FrankenPHP showed how fast PHP can actually run.

PHP — the community — is the other side of the coin. Thanks to PHP, I've been able to explore various parts of the world and deliver over 300 conference talks in the past 15 years. This period has led to many new friendships, and I appreciate everyone I've encountered in person.

We decided to give back to the community by running a few smaller open-source projects like Disco and speaking at conferences and events. Additionally, we started organizing an unconference called unKonf and actively support the local PHP meetups in Mannheim and Frankfurt.

Thank you, PHP!