2017, Year in review

Written the 29th December 2017 .

2017 has been a surprising year at many levels for Hoa and its community. Let's dig in.

First of all: Numbers! Hoa libraries have been downloaded more than 4'318'000 times in 2017, which sets the total to 8'585'000 downloads! A peak of 700 downloads per hour has been recorded on February. Thank you for these incredible numbers. The community on Github has welcomed 493 new users, to reach 2381 stargazers. The global community now reaches 2584 members, yepee!

The community has defined an ambitious roadmap for 2017, which is not complete, and will continue to run on 2018. The main goal is: High quality. Some highlights of this roadmap:

The main contribution to the PHP community is Kitab, to render the API documentation as HTML files —with a powerful static search engine— and to test the documentation. The 0.10 version has been tagged, and we are slowly deploying it on all Hoa libraries. A more detailed blog post will be published.

This roadmap is ambitious. It contains a lot of work, maybe too much, but we have time. It's important to limit the BC break in the Hoa and PHP ecosystem. The most ambitious part is about futures and native asynchronous code, the RFC are still in draft.

Defining the roadmap as a set of RFC is a community effort. It is new for Hoa, and so far, it is a success. Everyone can focus on specific tasks, discuss, and work together. What we miss in mentorship, and it introduces the next point.

A large majority of the core members faced life hard in 2017: Move to another country, jobless, new jobs, break-ups, diseases, burnouts, babies… Well, life happens, that's expected. At this scale though, it's unexpected. Hoa has about 10-15 core members, and more or less 5 remain today. To be clear, this is not dangerous for the project. Hoa still receives new contributions, the roadmap runs at a constant rythme, the download frequency is constant, new projects include Hoa, everything is great. The only impact so far on the project is that Hoa Apex 4th edition has been canceled twice, and the mentorship program for the 2017 roadmap has been canceled too. This is unfortunate, but, eh, life happens. It can sound guileless but Hoa community members are friends: We meet often, we share life events, we help each others. Consequently, we prefer to slow things down a little bit to take care of each others. We think this is natural.

To end on a positive note: More companies or projects trust us and use us! Automattic —the company behinds WordPress.com, WooCommerce and many more softwares— uses Hoa, and especially Kitab; Doctrine is about to use Hoa too, railt is using Hoa for a promising GraphQL framework; Alice is about to use Hoa, and many more! Thank you to trust us!

The future of Hoa is bright. The project is living, the community is breathing, more and more companies and projects trust us. Thank you for this year full of surprises. We can't wait for the 2018 review!