It’s not something new and has been floating around for a long time. In May 2021, right after Joe Watkins published his Avoiding Busses blog post, we started discussing the idea of a PHP Foundation. Not to mention an overwhelming burden on the maintainer, which unfortunately in the world of OSS often leads to people burning out. It puts the language that powers 78% of the Web in a fragile position. Losing one of the main contributors to PHP is a blow to the community, because he is the bearer of a lot of knowledge and expertise. Thank you, Nikita, for everything you’ve done for PHP! Your work is truly appreciated by millions of PHP developers. As sad as it is to see him go, we congratulate Nikita and wish him every success in his new journey! Nikita is leaving JetBrains as of December 1 and will spend significantly less time on PHP. And just like PHP, when it grew from a hobby to a real job, Nikita has decided to focus his professional activities on LLVM. Three major releases – PHP 7.4, PHP 8.0, and PHP 8.1 – include many of his contributions from that period.īesides PHP, Nikita has long been a contributor to Rust and LLVM. Nikita has worked on PHP at JetBrains for close to three years, managing to accomplish a lot during that time. During his 10 years in the PHP world, Nikita implemented innumerable features, bug fixes, and improvements to the development process of the language. He made his first contribution in PHP 5.5. Nikita started working on PHP in 2011 when he was still in high school. In 2021, PHP is in for another round of evolution.

During PHP’s 26-year history, the language has been actively developed by a huge number of people, such as Rasmus Lerdorf, Zeev Suraski, Andi Gutmans, Nikita Popov, and many, many others.

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