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Here, Nuno Maduro talks about the story behind the creation of Pest PHP, how the name came about and the impact open-source has had on his career.
Transcript
Well, during my open source career, I actually have built some quite of big projects. One of them is Collision and the other one is PHP Insights. Of course, there’s all these contributions to the Laravel framework, but particularly Pest PHP, is the one that got more traction.
It’s a very funny story, by the way. Pest PHP started as an idea in Laracon US. So it was basically with my buddy, Freek Murze from Belgium. And I was with him in Central Park. And at the time, I remember I was doing a lot of JavaScript, and JavaScript has this testing framework with the name Jest. And I come up with Freek and I said: “Hey Freek, what do you think if we do a PHP Jest, basically? A testing framework that looks like Jest, but on PHP?” And he told me, “I think it’s a very good idea, to be honest, Jest as very simple. And having that in PHP would be would be pretty good.”
And on the flight back. From us to two friends, actually, what happened was I build a POC of that idea that I had with Freek and after building the POC, something that happened was I was using that POC in all my projects.
And eventually that just come up to me to say, “OK, if I’m using this thing all the time, maybe other people will see the value on this POC”. So I build the website, I build the entire project from scratch, and I publish it on GitHub and Twitter and got so many traction.
It was a pretty good day for me. So, yeah, PEST PHP is now the second most PHP testing framework out there, according to JetBrains. And all of this happened because I have started with open-source. So again, if it wasn’t for the small, the small, the documentation commit that I have done five years ago, I wouldn’t be even near the position I am today with open-source, with Laravel, with my side projects. Everything started with that single first commit to documentation.
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