2024: A year in review

2024 is coming to a close and as I've done for the last 4 years, I'm here again with a blog post talking about the year and how it's been.

Open-source

Quite like 2023, I've been quite quiet on the open-source front. I've continued to maintain a few packages and some Filament plugins, but I didn't really do anything too groundbreaking.

The PXP project sat there, dormant, for a few months. Admittedly, I think I was dealing with quite a bit of burnout. Even though I wanted to spend some time working on it, I just didn't have the energy.

It's quite disappointing actually because I had a major breakthrough on how I wanted the project to grow and progress, then BAM, burnout.

As we approach the end of the year though, I'm starting to find some energy and I've started to pick things back up. Having some time away from a project gives you a fresh perspective when you come back to it. At first you forget what's what and then you have a eureka moment and realise that what you were doing isn't the best.

Besides my existing packages and PXP, I did actually spend some time on a problem that I've been wanting to solve for a few years now – syntax highlighting. I've been using Shiki for ages but it always annoyed me how slow it was and how much setup was needed to get it working from PHP. So I really dug into the complexities of TextMate grammars and released Phiki, a syntax highlighter written in PHP that uses TextMate grammars and VSCode themes to produce beautifully highlighted code.

If you read a few of my blog posts, you'll see it in action. The results have been excellent and I've had quite a few people reach out to me with nothing but kind things to say about the project.

Content Creation

Not including this post, I've written 17 blog posts for this site. I used to write about all sorts but much like my open-source work, I've just not had the energy. Still, 17 posts isn't bad.

I also continued working on my Rust for PHP Developers video course. At the time of writing this, there are more than 40 videos published and I've still got a few that need to be edited and published. I'm super thankful to those who purchased the course and waited patiently for me to release the videos. Burnout was the biggest bottleneck, but I'm happy I've managed to get so many videos out for people to enjoy.

In hindsight, I regret doing the pre-order sale. I wanted to make sure that people were interested and that the time spent on the videos could be offset, but it also added a tonne of subconscious pressure. In future, I'll probably just do a typical newsletter thing for seeing if there's any interest.

Conferences

I attended a few conferences in 2024.

Laracon EU
Laravel Live UK (Speaker)
Laracon US

All of them were great. It's always nice to hear people talking about things you're not 100% clued up on, but it's also nice to see people who you might only get to see once a year.

I'm looking forward to attending more conferences in 2025.

Work

Funnily enough, I wrote about burnout in 2023 and how that led to me changing jobs. I was freelancing on top of a full-time job and it was a bit too much.

As we enter 2025, I'm very excited to announce that I'll be leaving my current role and starting a new one at a very special company.

I can't wait to get started. I'll be working with some of the smartest people in the industry and honestly, I think it might be the dream job for a lot of Laravel developers.

Looking forward to 2025

I'm going to continue working on PXP. I've got some ideas that I want to experiment with, mostly aimed towards making it hyper-useful to PHP developers and removing the need to know Rust to help contribute to its success.

I want to continue working on cool things and sharing them online too. Not because there is some magical problem that "thing" is going to fix, but because I want to build something for the sake of building it.

Happy New Year!

Ryan