2025: A year in review
2025 has officially ended and we are now in 2026. As I've done for the last 6 years, here is a blog post reviewing my year and looking ahead into the next.
Open source
Just like the last couple of years, the open source side of things has been pretty quiet. I'm still maintaining my packages and keeping them in check.
The biggest thing I worked on open source wise is definitely Phiki 2.0.
It was a complete rewrite of the internals and got everything almost perfect compared to Shiki and vscode-textmate. I'm super happy with how it turned out and glad that PHP developers are able to get super clean syntax highlighting without all of the faff that comes with JavaScript pacakges.
On a slightly more somber note, I archived the PXP project in March 2025. I spoke about how I wanted to revive the project in the last end of year review and that was the intention, but I quickly realised that a project of that size wouldn't be the best thing to work on whilst also pumping out tonnes of cool Forge stuff at Laravel.
Content Creation
Not including this post, I've written 12 blog posts for this site. Another slow year on the blog, but I'm happy with the things I've posted.
I published a few videos too on random bits and bobs, but not as many as I would've liked.
Conferences
I attended a few conferences in 2025.
- Laracon EU (Speaker)
- Laravel Live UK (Sponsor)
- Laracon US
- Laravel Live DK
- wire:live (Speaker)
They were all excellent events. It was my first year as a Laravel employee which allowed me to attend more events than I usually would which I'm super grateful for.
Work
What a year it has been. I started at Laravel in January and immediately dove straight in to work on the next-generation of Forge.
It was great to work with a team of super talented developers, designers, and project managers. The launch went about as well as it could have and we were all super proud of what we had achieved in such a small amount of time.
Looking at 2026
2026 is an interesting year. I've officially moved on from the Forge (core services) team and will be working on Cloud for the foreseeable future.
It's definitely a switch up from Forge and I can't wait to get into all of the nitty-gritty that comes with cloud platforms.
I'm sad to be leaving the Forge team but I absolutely believe that they'll continue to smash it.
I'm also working on a new SaaS product for PHP developers, specifically those of you who want to monetize your work. It's called Privato and will be launching in the next month or so.
You pay a flat monthly fee for the platform, bring your own Stripe account and Privato takes care of the rest. No fees per purchase or anything, a single monthly payment instead.
I'll keep it short this year and let you carry on with your 2026 celebrations.
Happy New Year!
Ryan