Ryan Chandler
General

2022: A year in review

• 3 min read

Personal

Not much has happened in my personal life this year. We're due to move house again soon, but other than that nothing major has changed.

Work

I'm still a full-time developer at Surewise. I've spent 2022 working on new systems and improving existing ones. We're continuing to adopt Livewire and Alpine.js across our stack.

We did upgrade to PHP 8.1 this year and will be looking to upgrade to PHP 8.2 early in 2023.

Freelance

My freelance adventures continued into 2022 and I've kept up with last years pace quite well. This will continue into 2023 as well as I continue to work on TALL related projects.

Open-source

It's been a bit of a quiet year on the OSS side of things. I've continued to maintain my projects and packages on GitHub and have started working on a couple of new ones.

With my day job and freelance work, it's sometimes hard to find time for OSS work. When I do get time to work on non-work related things, I tend to focus on passion projects and things that I'm interested in.

The most noteworthy project that I've worked on this year is probably a PHP parser written in Rust. I broke ground on this project in July and worked on it here and there. The progression has increased dramatically over the last month or so with some help from Saif (azjezz) who has done lots of refactoring on the project and several optimizations, as well as adding support for things that were missing. So thank you!

My goal in 2023 is to explore the realm of Rust-powered tooling for PHP even more. I've got a "small" list of projects, some of which I've already started to experiment with:

  • Linter
  • Code formatter
  • Static analysis
  • Superset

Our cousins in JavaScript-land have been taking advantage of faster tooling for a couple of years now and there's been very few attempts at doing the same for PHP. I'd like to be the pioneer of this effort and take the first steps into this unexplored realm of productive PHP tooling.

Epilogue

As always, I want to say a huge thank you to everybody who has supported my OSS work, blog posts and sponsored me on GitHub. The continued support helps maintain my existing projects and packages, as well the development of new ones.

I set some more goals last year, I managed to complete one of those:

  • Reach 5,000 followers on Twitter.

I definitely wrote some more blog posts and streamed on YouTube but the consistency wasn't great.

I won't set myself any content related goals for 2023, but I would still like to speak at a conference. That would be pretty cool.

We'll see how that turns out in 2023.