Support the whole PHP Ecosystem | Mark Baker's Blog

Support the whole PHP Ecosystem

Just a few short weeks ago, for a 24 Days in December post, I wrote about remembering all of the Open Source Maintainers that create and support the tools that we all use as developer in our daily work. It isn’t always the obvious tools and frameworks (PHP itself, PHPStorm, Symfony, Laravel, Composer, XDebug, PHPUnit) that make a difference; there are so many unsung heroes that work in the background making our work so much easier.

Look at the dev tools, including static analysis, automated documentation and coding standards. Look at your composer.lock file, and see all of those dependencies that are being pulled in by the libraries and frameworks. Think about how the images for your docker or vagrant/virtual boxes are built; and whose components you use for those. Look at your CI pipeline, and see how PHP is set up, or composer cache. Think about the free online tools that you use for code snippets, or transposing data formats. Consider the free APIs that you might use to monitor your sites, or provide information that you use in your applications. There are so many people who’s names you probably don’t even know that contribute and support our work.

Now at New Year is a good time to be thankful for all of those people, and perhaps make a small donation toward their work, which helps us to do our work.