Nikita Popov joins PhpStorm Team

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We are very happy to announce that starting this year, Nikita Popov, a well-known long-time PHP ecosystem contributor, is joining JetBrains to work with the PhpStorm team! The focus of his work – improving the PHP ecosystem – will remain the same. And of course, we are excited to explore what becomes possible with such collaboration between the IDE and runtime experts.

Nikita is the author of generators, variadic functions and argument unpacking, AST as an internal structure in PHP, engine exceptions, uniform variable syntax, and many other PHP contributions.

He worked with Dmitry Stogov and Xinchen Hui on NG project, which later became PHP 7.

Nikita is also known for PHP Parser which laid the groundwork for many other tools such as PHPStan, Psalm, BetterReflection, Infection, SuperClosure, and PHP-DI, just to name a few.

It all started with Nikita’s tweet saying that he was looking for job opportunities. Here at JetBrains, we’ve been closely following many language ecosystems for almost two decades now. And at PhpStorm, we are fans of Nikita’s work. We always supported the Open Source, and this felt like a new opportunity – so here we are! Nikita will continue contributing awesome features to PHP, and together we will experiment on what is possible in the realm of language tooling.

Nikita is off to a quick start at JetBrains and is now working on finishing the Typed Properties implementation and fixing all the subtle bugs found in the process. Next, the plan is to continue working on new PHP core features, fixing some inconsistencies, and cleaning things up.

Hopefully, this collaboration will be long, productive, fun, and very beneficial to the whole PHP community! Please give a warm welcome to Nikita!