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2023: A Year in Tutorials & Open Source

For SymfonyCon 2022, I wore a Mickey Mouse costume in front of over 1000 Symfony developers. This year, I brought my 7-year-old son Beckett. You all treated him like a star, made him balloon animals & helped him build Legos. The rest of the year, I got to play with Symfony, create tutorials and work with some of the most gifted people I know to build open source tools that I'm extremely proud of.

I have an odd, wonderful job, entirely crowd-sourced by you lovely people.

So in the interest of openness, I wanted to share what we did in 2023, my hopes and dreams for 2024 and... some stats!

2023 Open Source

In 2023, I spent 636 hours on open source, entirely sponsored by SymfonyCasts - i.e. you! The truth is that open source takes time, and time requires money. You make this economically possible. Victor also worked hard on supporting our libraries, which was huge.

My time breaks down into a few major buckets:

  • AssetMapper 235 hours
    • Bootstrapped the new component from scratch
    • Ushered in the "no build" era for Symfony!
  • Symfony UX 143 hours
    • 7 minor releases (2.7 - 2.13) with hundreds of new features
    • The <twig:Component /> HTML syntax!
    • 3 new components: ux-translator and ux-svelte, ux-toggle-password
    • Added StimulusBundle
  • Live Components 135 hours
    • Smart rendering system added
    • Much more robust hydration system & support for DTOs
    • Stabilization: the package will soon not be experimental
    • Deferred / lazy loading

We also created new packages!

None of this mentions the real work: maintenance, reviewing pull requests, fixing tests, etc. I work on this, but the true stars are people from the community & the Symfony core team. For example, check out the work from nicolas-grekas! Thanks to our users, SymfonyCasts is able to financially support Symfony itself in a significant way.

2023 Tutorials

In 2023, we published 19.2 hours of content, which is slightly down from 2022 (20.7 hours). That's frustrating. There is so much content I'd like to cover, and we have big goals this year to streamline our processes. Personally, I'd love to hit 30 or 40 hours. Symfony deserves that. And, fortunately, the SymfonyCasts team helps so I can focus my time.

How many tutorials were watched? Over 3100 DAYS of content was watch last year. That's nearly 10 years of tutorials in 1 year! The top tutorials were:

Screencast Days Watched
Symfony 538
ApiPlatform 239
Symfony Fundamentals 185
Symfony & Doctrine 155
EasyAdminBundle 147
Symfony Security 121
ApiPlatform Ep2 102
Stimulus 94
Messenger 88
Symfony 5 73

If you zoom into the final 3 months, not surprisingly LAST Stack and API Platform episode 3 are 6th and 8th.

How long does it take to make a tutorial? Great question! The biggest variance depends on research. Yup, sometimes I have a lot to learn before hitting record!

***TIP

  • wh - "work hours" - the number of hours of work spent
  • vh - "video hour" - the number of hours of video produced

The times below are my hours: they don't take into account editing and other important things I have help with.

The key is wh/vh: how much work goes into each hour of video produced. I have a few ideas to improve this:

  • New tutorial authoring tool. We use a fantastic, internal tool called TutsHero to help us build the code for each tutorial. But it's time to modernize that and better integrate it with the recording process. This should also alleviate the time it takes to add our magic "code blocks".

  • AI in Script Editing. Fun fact: I first record rough audio while recording the video. We use AI to transcribe that. Then we manually clean up the script, reformatting code (foo arrow bar becomes $foo->bar()), adding ticks around code, and rephrasing. Finally, I record this. The script editing this takes a significant amount of time and I think AI can help automate this.

What about other authors? Sure! Though finding consistent, high-quality authors is hard. If you have a passion for teaching, definitely reach out!

2023 SymfonyCasts.com

Our team - Diego, Vladimir, Victor & Leanna - work a lot on SymfonyCasts.com so that we can have nice things... and I can focus on tutorials (Diego & Victor also help with creating tutorials).

Out of the million different things from 2023, one stands out: our new Tailwind-powered design. We're rolling this out slowly - but you can see it on this blog section or any course pages. And this is more than a re-skinning: it's a chance for us to embrace the LAST Stack principles: leverage Turbo, delete a lot of custom JavaScript and use Stimulus everywhere. It's fantastically fun to work with.

Comments & Questions Answered

At the end of each tutorial, I like to say:

If you have any questions, we're here for you down in the comments.

And we mean it. In 2023, 2572 comments were posted to the site, out of which 1144 were replies from us. The best part? All of those questions and answers live in public: they help everyone.

What about 2024?

So what's next? I have a few goals for 2024:

  • More languages. Each new tutorial's script and subtitles are already translated into Spanish in a high-quality way thanks to AI. We should add more languages to make the content accessible to more people.

  • More tutorials. We have a lot of ideas for new tutorials. We're also working on a new authoring tool to help us create them faster.

  • Live-streaming. I started live-streaming in 2023 and it was fun! Should we keep doing it? Channel at - https://www.youtube.com/@weaverryan.

  • Videos of Ryan. That's me! In 2024, I'd like to actually get on camera for the videos. We'll see how that goes :).

Got something else on your mind? Let me know in the comments!

And thank you ❤️.