2023 Recap

I've seen these posts floating around in previous years and I always enjoy reading them so firstly, here's some of my favourites:

• Christoph Rumpel
• Freek Van Der Herten

My 2023 started off with 2 goals:

• Release my first Open Source PHP Package
• Contribute to some of my favourite Open Source projects

I'm happy to say that I achieved both of these goals!

Release my first Open Source PHP Package

With something I was working on at work, I came up with the idea of my Faker Stripe package. Basically, it's a provider for FakerPHP which allows you to generate Stripe IDs for things like Payments, Customers and Accounts, that follow the Stripe ID convention.

I was blown away with the support the package got when I announced it on Twitter. It even got picked up and featured on Laravel News which I was absolutely not expecting at all! The package is now on 80 stars on GitHub and over 7000 downloads!

I will continue to update the package in 2024, ensuring that it caters to any IDs that the Stripe API can generate.

Contribute to some of my favourite Open Source projects

I actually contributed to a handful of projects this year. Each project was one that I've used in projects and wanted to give back to. Below are some of my favourites that I've worked on:

SaloonPHP

• Add Dependabot Config
• Add saloon:list Command
• Choose HTTP method when using saloon:request command
• Minimum Laravel 10 For Future Releases

PestPHP

• add expectations for uppercase, lowercase, alpha and alphanumeric
• add toHaveConstructor() and toHaveDestructor() expectations
• Add toBeBetween expectation
• Add toBeStringBackedEnum() and toBeIntBackedEnum() Architecture Expectations

Elephpant.me

• limit country list to active countries
• add image and status to statistics page
• filter trade area by country

It's safe to say, I love working on Open Source projects! I will continue to contribute to SaloonPHP and PestPHP in 2024, whenever I think of something that I think will benefit others. In fact, I have one thing in mind for PestPHP right now 😉

Additionally, whilst not really an "Open Source Project", I helped my good friend Ashley Allen with his latest book, Consuming APIs in Laravel. This was super fun to help with and I actually ended up learning some things about the topic that I never knew before! If your work (like mine) involves dealing with APIs and integrating them in Laravel applications, then please pick the book up!

Aims for 2024

There's a couple of things I want to aim for in 2024, so let's see how I do!

• I want to push Faker Stripe out there and get it listed on the Third Party Libraries page on the FakerPHP website.
• I want to attend an in-person PHP Meet-up. I think it'll be a good way to finally meet the amazing folks I've been conversing with via GitHub and Twitter
• I want to deliver a talk at work about testing PHP applications. Testing is something I'm pretty passionate about and it can actually be fun if you use the correct tools! I'd like to deliver a talk about it in one of our quarterly Engineering Leads days!