Matt Stauffer on Shaping the Future of PHP Through the Foundation

Hey everyone, welcome to the show. Uh, with me today is a special guest. He's a member of the Larville Community Forever, open source creator, owner of Titan, the awesome agency within the Lville community, and the author of Letterville Up and Running. Uh, you got to have your props when you do your introductions. So, Matt, welcome to the show here. Thanks so much, my friend. So good to be here. I love it. So I have you on because you've got some big news. So in the last few weeks you've have actually joined the board of the PHP Foundation. So how did that come about? Yeah, so recently the PHP Foundation said, uh, we're looking for a new executive director. Uh, Dave Hicking, my friend, sent it to me and said, you only had time, you know, because it's a full-time job. And I laughed cuz I was like, yeah, I mean, I got a full-time job running an agency. And and after like I think a week or something like that, I was just like, man, that really would be the dream cuz I've wanted so long to be a part of helping PHP's reputation and marketing kind of like modernize. And I was like, "Oh, I could possibly actually do it, you know, bring everybody together." So, I went through the application process just saying, "Hey, I have a full-time job. I couldn't do this full-time. We'd have to work that out." And in the end, we're sort of like, "No, not really. It's not going to work." You know, for for various reasons why, you know, they said it's not going to be a good fit. And I was totally I was like, "Yeah, I'm on board." Um, but through that process, they kind of heard my vision for the community and what I'm excited about, what I've tried to do and not been able to do in the past. And they're like, "No, that's that's something we, you know, might want to have around as a voice. Would you be willing to be on the board?" And I was like, "I'm honored to be on the board." So, um, they they brought me onto the board. And then they also brought on the new executive director, Elizabeth Baron. So, she started at the end of February and then I joined at the end of March. I guess that's been a week a week ago. Yeah. Okay. I knew it was super like super relevant like it just happened. Um, so can you kind of give me I I know you're brand new, but sort of the insights into what this PHP foundation actually does and their purpose in the grand scheme of PHP. Yeah, 100%. I mean, if you go to the PHPFoundation, you're going to get a really good kind of language show. The big pitch at the top that says we support, advance, and develop the PHP language. And the mission goes into the further kind of direction there, but it's basically a whole bunch of people who are all relying on the PHP language, whether because they were a company that uses PHP, they were a framework that is built on PHP, maybe they're a hosting company that deals with PHP or whatever. They all said, "We want PHP to, you know, have longevity. We want to do the work that it takes to make sure it not only continues, but it continues and thrives, you know." And so they said, "We're going to provide uh financial support." So these are it's based on a lot of these companies being what they're called platinum sponsors to kind of give financial support to the foundation to help it advance it going on. Um but then also guidance. So they've got people you know like the founder of PHP and other folks like actively contributing towards helping make sure it moves forward together cuz the PHP organization is really just PHP internals. The only organization there is around PHP is internals and internals is really just a bunch of developers who want to work on really low-level PHP stuff. And that's great and wonderful and we all need them there and we're grateful for them doing what they're doing. But there's a difference between being a developer and being a marketer, being a developer and being a fundraiser, being a developer and thinking about community, right? I'm not saying developers can't do those things, but right now PHP itself really just has internals. And so the idea behind the foundation was let's build kind of support and structure outside of just some developers, many of whom were doing this work in their free time because it was love of the game kind of thing. Let's get finances behind it. Let's get organization. let's get kind of guidance structure around it. So the foundation tries to do all those things in conversation and relationship with the PHP internals. Gotcha. So so they don't have like super I guess sort of the internals is still sort of like a separate entity in that like you're not guiding what internals are doing through the board so much as giving them support. Is that the right way of thinking about it? That is the right way to think about it. I wouldn't say there's no guidance whatsoever in part because the PHP Foundation has a bunch of contractors basically they're providing financial support to a bunch of developers many of whom maybe all but I don't think all but definitely many of whom are a part of PHP internals but at least as of right now PHP Foundation doesn't say you need to work on this you need to work on that PHP Foundation just says we're grateful for what you're doing for the community here's some money so you can keep doing it so as of right now there's no structure I don't know if that's how it's going to be forever I don't know of any plans to change that, but I could say for for right now that is definitively what's going on. Uh so it's funny cuz when when I joined it, a lot of people said, "Oh, get me, you know, get me what was the thing everybody wanted? Primitives, everything like that." And I'm like, "Y'all, I'm sorry, but I'm, you know, maybe I have like a a 5% stronger voice than I did before to go bother somebody, but in the end, it's still internals as internals. They have their own voting processes. They only have they have their own way of doing things. Foundation's not in charge of them at all." Gotcha. And u and now as far as the board goes um do you know how long sort of you you're going to stay on the board or how often they get rotated around? It's a three-year um three-year term in general. You could quit early, you could be fired early, but in general it's a three-year term. Um I don't know exactly what the executive director is going to be, but I imagine that her term is probably three years as well. Um there's a whole structured document about how the the the foundation is organized, how the board is organized. There's must be between five and 10 people and some of them must be from the platinum sponsors and some of from the community. It's all this kind of complicated thing, but a lot of it has to do basically with honoring the three-year term, uh people being nominated by another board member, uh being voted in and having the correct number of people from the community and from the platinum sponsors and from the non-platinum sponsors to build an actual kind of good structured board within the shape of five to 10 people. Awesome. And I'm assuming just like any board you you have to meet x number of times per year and it's sort of yeah keep minutes the whole nine yards. You got it. Y not me. Thankfully Elizabeth is handling all of that. Um but yeah so we've got a monthly meeting. Elizabeth is taking all the notes and everything like that. Um and she's the one who's going to communicate our decisions and the things we're thinking about out to the public. And the prior executive director was not a paid position. It was Roman doing a little bit of work basically on top of his Jet Brains job. And I think Jet Brains may have given him a few hours a week to work on it, but he really did not have the ability to like do the things he'd want to do. Like Roman full-time would have killed, but Roman had a full-time job. So, one of the things I guess that the the board made the decision to do is say in order to be like the fullness of who we want to be, we got to put our money where our mouth is we need an executive director who can actually kind of make this their main job. And so I imagine we're going to see even more communication, even more structure just because of Elizabeth being in a different position than Roman was in. Um, but of course I also hope that as a board member I get to, you know, help us do a good job of all these things too. So yeah, that's awesome. And well that and that sort of was my second question in a way is like let's say she's on she's the leader for two or three years after that. Do you get to remain on the board? you're just not in the um president position or whatever position that's called again, the director position, executive director, or do you have to like you're out for so long and then you get to come back in from the bottom. It's not 100% clear whether the executive director is or isn't on the board. I think that's actually part of the conversation they're trying to have right now. My guess, and I should go look at the history, is my guess is that Roman was both the ED and then also was on the board. Roman is definitely on the board right now. So, I don't know exactly how that all pans out. Um, but if I had to guess, I would guess that they end up saying the executive direct director is not a part of the board and has a limited term, maybe three years or something like that. And if someone were to go from three years as the ED to three years on the board, that would be perfectly acceptable. But that's a pure guess. We haven't had any conversations about it. I don't I'm not privy to anything private. It's just that's just a guess from my side. So Gotcha. Yeah. and and and to sort of prefix or postfix again Matt's only been on the board for a week. So like what we're doing on this I know nothing at this point. So my next question since you know I'm in Laravel you're in Laravel what is that going to mean for Laravel as a whole or do we even know at this point yet? We don't know. But one thing I can say for sure is that historically uh Taylor and I, others, but definitely Taylor and I have spent a lot of time and energy trying to build bridges between the PHP world and the layer world. And we worked really hard on it like close to 10 years ago and didn't see a lot of success. Um, and I think that this is the beginning of a new round of that. I think this is the beginning of a new moment for there to be bridges not just between Laravel and like PHP. I mean because Laravel's written in PHP we are PHP right? But for some reason there has just been this idea that like PHP means a certain set of people who went to conferences together who are using a certain set of like old school approved frameworks and Laravel was never a part of that for some strange reason. It's all BS and I don't think that the people I'm talking to or interacting with the day dayto-day have any desire to see that be the case. So my hope is that this is the beginning of like a new era of Laravel feeling connected to the rest of the PHP world and the rest of the PHP world feeling like Laravel is connected. They're sharing resources, sharing kind of knowledge and I again PHP is not old school people who refuse to use a framework and then WordPress is not PHP and Laravel is not PHP. To me PHP is anybody who's using PHP which means Laravel is PHP and WordPress is PHP and all these other people are. So, I hope that we are going to be able to get a way where we're stepping out of silos a little bit. But in the past when someone said stepping out of silos, it meant, you know, like it was just this really imbalanced thing that people used to like kind of be like, well, Laravel shouldn't. My hope is that it's just we're all friends. We all help each other. We all are contributing. Um, so in terms of what this means for Laravel, I do think it is a a little olive branchy from the existing like the PHP world and we're going to take that olive branch and we're going to, you know, extend one ourselves, you know, like a a positive thing. Um, it doesn't mean that all of a sudden now that I can just say everything Laravel, the Laravel world wants is now going to be in the language, right? Um, but it does mean that I can say like, "Hey guys, like we're trying to" One of the things I said in my first call was I'm like, "I'm on business development calls. people want to use Laravel and they hear that PHP is old and outdated. Uh I will do the work it takes to work within the PHP Foundation because one of the things PHP foundation has the ability to do is marketing and and positioning. I'm like that's one of the things I want to work on as a board member. I want to work on whatever I can do to help make PHP's marketing and reputation uh move forward in the way that things like Laravel's marketing reputation have moved forward. I think we're all going to benefit from that, right? uh I am in these sales calls being told we were we are almost the whole way through and then somebody on the board said it's PHP you can't work with us and and we lose the the project and that means Laravel loses that that that client right we we lose that potential whole contribution to our world I'm hoping that the board will give me the opportunity to to fix some of that yeah yeah that would be that would be really nice um and two it's like it's to me it's always been weird because like there's this divide but it's just different communities sort to see the world differently, but we're still all the same in the end. We're just developers and we like to build stuff. And so that was always weird to me in, you know, coming from the code igniter/ Laraveville side is like how people didn't like either one of those frameworks. It's like, well, you know, it is what it is. But, uh, so I'm really excited for that part of it. I think I think that would be huge because you know like you mentioned WordPress you know there's so many WordPress, Drupal, PHPB if it's still around, you know that sort of just kind of are out there and they exist in their own silos like you said. Um so I guess leading from there and the foundation side like if people want to contribute like what how can people help at this moment? Is it more of just helping PHP, you know, answer going to the internal side and then like, you know, building up and then the found the foundation takes a notice of them and like, hey, we want you to be on this board now or um do you have any ideas there? Yeah, one of the things we talked about on the first one that I actually was on was what does it look like to make it easier for people to contribute because uh one of the things Elizabeth did when she first stepped in this position is interviewed like 60 people back toback and said what are the issues and one of the things she heard a lot was we would love PHP to be easier for people to contribute towards and so we started talking about well what what it should be easier is are we talking about PHP internals are we talking about the PHP website um and I think that a lot of our conversations in these first 6 to 12 months are going to be around what does it look like to bring more people in to knowing what's going on to knowing what their contribution can look like and all of that. Um, also I think that one of the things I'll I'll say is don't consider donating to the PHP Foundation especially getting your company to donate. Um, but one of the things we want to do as the PHP Foundation is make it really clear what that actually does because you know like PHP Foundation is doing things but what are the things that they're doing and what would your money make happen that's not happening without your money? That's not super clear right now. So I would say it's probably worth finding some way to either get in touch with one of the members of the board. You know, follow one of us on your favorite social media platform or the PHP Foundation itself. If you go to the PHP foundation down in the footer, you can see, you know, foundations on Twitter and all the other platforms. So check that out because the hope is that that is going to be the space where things are communicated. They're saying, "Hey, here is what we're going to do now. You could see where the money would go. can you bring your company in to sponsor us because it will go towards this. Um, but also things like, uh, hey, have you always wanted to contribute to internals, but it was really unclear how to do so? Now, we're making it easy. Here's a video. Here's a guide. Here's whatever. So, I would say the answer of what to do right now is um, I think the main thing the PHP Foundation could use help with is uh, a patience and b money. Um, but while I would say that somebody giving money to the foundation is great, uh, if you're interested in it, you know, again, go check out the PHP foundation. It'll tell you what the money is being spent towards, whatever. I think that's all going to be communicated better in the future. And what more money goes towards more of will also be better communicated in the future. So, I would say if you're like, look, I've got a company, we're using PHP, I'm hearing about this. I'm like, oh yeah, I really want to see all the things happen. Then please come have your company support the PHP Foundation. Make it happen, right? Like that that is absolutely valuable. Don't let me stop you. But if you're hearing this and you're like, man, you know, you're asking for money and I don't know even know what it does. That's fine. That's a very reasonable point and don't just do nothing because of that, right? Go follow the foundation. Follow me if you want. I'll be talking about stuff we're working on. Um, you know, go check it out or maybe even give it the $10 a month range. You know, again, I don't I'm not saying individuals have to give a ton of money. I don't think the answer of the PHP Foundation is a bunch of people getting $5 a month. Not that anyone shouldn't, but to me it is all of the companies that are making all the money that we make because we have PHP. Those are the folks I'm like consider kicking back a little bit. You know, that's so yeah, I would say consider supporting. If you're making money off of PHP, consider supporting and give a little patience, but stay connected, you know, because if you were patient and then you never see what we do, well then I don't know. But if you're patient and paying attention, um there's there's more cool stuff coming. Awesome. Awesome. the uh well I was going to say one thing that uh I think you mentioned is like the foundation actually uh sponsors or pays contributors to actually make PHP better. And to me, like that's one of the benefits of of a thing like this is now instead of just being like, oh well, this is my spare time and you know, you you actually can pay people to do some work, which is awesome, especially with considering how big and uh PHP is, you know, it's it's it's used everywhere. Yeah. Uh right now, if you go to the php.foundation/structure, you can see 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 people uh who are contractors from the foundation. They're full-time, some of them part-time, some of them, and they're all working on either the language or things that are kind of core connected to the language. I think again, I think all of these folks are actually working on the core, but if not, uh they're all definitely working on things that are very close to the core. So, yeah, literally one way to help PHP as a language continue is to give money to the PHP Foundation so that they can support these people financially who are helping PHP continue. But again, it will be clear in the future, but don't don't let that stop you. So, Right. Right. Well, and if if I if I heard correctly what you said earlier, you if your company gives enough, you can actually get a board seat. That's true. That is a way to to have an impact. There you go. There's there's your end right there. You get your company to be a diamond or whatever partner and and you'll you'll have a little voice in there. That's a good point. But Matt, um, I want to th that was sort of all the questions I had written down. Um, I want to sort of open the floor to you and and you know, let you close us out, go through anything that I may have missed that you'd like, uh, you know, the Larville community to know about. Yeah, I mean, I think I would say the main thing is that the PHP Foundation is primarily equipped to do things that that everything other than the actual specific code of PHP. And I I still think there's a future where the foundation has a little bit more guidance towards the code that's happening. But that's that's not in my hands. What I can say it definitely has the ability to do is help the community, help the inter relations, help the um help the ecosystem, help the marketing, help the reputation of PHP. Nobody's better equipped to do that than the PHP Foundation. And the thing is that I I know that there are like some language level features that Laravel people have always wanted like let's give our multi-line short closures great. But in general, if you hear a person in Laravel ask for something from PHP, it's almost always reputational. It's almost always uh, you know, let's make the marketing better, let's make the docs clearer, let's make it less, you know, negative next opinion about it in Silicon Valley, let's get boot camps to actually use PHP, right? That is what the PHP foundation is uniquely and especially equipped to do. So, if you want to see those happen, and that's the things I want to see happen, then you want to support the PHP Foundation. If you are in business and you're struggling with the negative reputation people have about PHP, you want to support the PHP Foundation. If you want, you know, to if you're tired of this whole thing where, you know, PHP found feels like the, you know, the not cool kid or whatever, you want the PHP Foundation, right? So, a certainly consider giving financially, but B, I will be asking people to help donate design. You know, if someone's like, look, I don't have money to give, but I got design skills. I don't got money to give, but I understand social media. I understand marketing. I have connections, whatever. We're going to try and do that. If if you're like, "Look, I work at a university and I use Laravel. I'm going to probably be wanting to talk to you to figure out what does it look like? I work at a boot camp and I'm interested in Laravel." All these things like we the the personal connections are the things that I think that we have the lot of opportunity to take advantage of in turning this thing over where we're no longer freaking talking about PHP being the reason, you know, PHP's negative reputation being the reason anything happens. I'm tired of it. It's time to be done with it. And I think that the foundation is equipped to solve that better than anybody else. Love that. I love that. I'm I'm very excited for the future because, you know, I feel like this has been needed for years. And, you know, having somebody I know on the board is kind of cool. So, you know, I know I'm not going to get in with you, but you know, just knowing somebody that, hey, somebody's on the board, somebody's looking out for, you know, not saying my best interest, but Laravel, you know, you have us in looking out for your best interest. Eric Barnes, are you kidding? I hear you. Well, that is true. Oh, but uh but Matt, I want to thank you so much for, you know, coming on, spending a few minutes just talking about this uh this new foundation and your board seat and all that because I think it's really cool and it's uh really interesting for our community. Thanks for having me, my friend. I really appreciate you.