The PHP Foundation
The PHP Foundation
We’re excited to share that Joe Watkins is joining the PHP Foundation as a contractor for the rest of 2025.
Joe has helped establish the PHP Foundation in 2021 and is a long-time contributor to PHP core. He is known for his work on extensions like parallel and PCOV and most recently, he released ORT, a blazing-fast ONNX runtime for PHP bringing native AI inference capabilities to PHP developers for the first time.
This decision comes outside our usual funding cycle, and it’s driven by two key factors:
Joe’s renewed health and momentum. While we initially planned to bring Joe on board in August 2024, his health at the time didn’t allow it. After reviewing our budget post-H1 2025 and realizing we had extra room, we saw an opportunity to support Joe’s return and enable him to contribute once again.
The impact of his work. ORT is a concrete step toward making PHP more capable and future-proof. Beyond code, Joe has also contributed to the PHP process itself — having proposed and championed several process-related RFCs over the years that helped shape how PHP evolves.
Joe is contracted for a limited number of hours in H2 2025. For 2026, he will be welcome to apply through our regular contributor funding process later this month, alongside others.
Here is what Joe has to say:
When we established The PHP Foundation, we were focused on raising the bus factor of PHP.
It's years later now, and the bus factor is no longer a major concern. The Foundation has contracted and trained very skilled developers, and the effort they have put in cannot be understated.
Moreover, we have the means to train and pay new developers, should the ones we have now decide to pursue other professional opportunities.We also imagined that from The Foundation would emerge a vision for PHP, something loosely resembling a roadmap. This isn't because The Foundation wanted to take control of the direction of the project, but rather a more practical concern. Namely, it's difficult to get sponsorship for "maintenance and development". It's easier to convince businesses to sponsor our activities when we know our goals are aligned.
No such road map has materialized; The Foundation has many generous businesses sponsoring the work that goes on, but the bi-directional communication between sponsors and developers is limited, and so alignment is not assured.
I joined the foundation as a developer so that I can address this problem.
My intention is to be the conduit between sponsors (the board members) and developers, to advocate for developers, and to communicate with them on behalf of the board.
I will also, as a developer, be able to advance my own ideas for the future of PHP.
PHP has been around for so long it feels like a part of the furniture of the web. It seems obvious that in ten years, PHP will still be relevant, as it was for the last ten and the ten years before that.
This isn't really the case; PHP has thrived because the ecosystem of the web allowed it to. While internals is focused on the development of the language at a syntax and API level, there's limited discussion of PHP "the product". PHP is a product, and The Foundation has to function something like a business, although our profit is measured in progress rather than pennies. We need to ask questions about adoption rates and relevance in a changing digital landscape. We must be able to answer these questions.
With an increase in bi-directional communication between board and developers, and the clarity this brings to our shared and declared goals, we can start to answer these questions.
If I succeed in my goals, there will emerge a roadmap, a physical document you can link to. But perhaps more importantly, we will have the necessary processes and structure in place within The Foundation to develop and maintain that roadmap and required alignment so that our work continues to address the concerns of the businesses paying for it.
Please join us in welcoming Joe back — and if you haven’t yet, check out what he’s been working on: github.com/krakjoe.
💜🐘