The Symfony blog has posted their wrap up of the activities around the project and its ecosystem in 2016. They cover releases made, events/conferences and updates on both components and documentation changes.

The beginning of a new year is the best moment to review all that happened during the previous year. These are some of the highlights of the 2016 year for the Symfony Project.

[...] 2016 was the best year in Symfony Project's history. 2017 will be even better and it will bring us new projects such as "Symfony Flex" (a new way to manage Symfony applications unveiled during the SymfonyCon Berlin 2016 conference), 1 billion downloads for Symfony Components (if the download rate keeps growing) and the return of the Symfony conferences to the United States (San Francisco, October 19-20).

Each of the sections talks about the changes over the last year and links to other resources, profiles and documentation about the update. This also includes the top contributors to the framework, new contributors and top documentation contributors.

The Laravel News site has published the results from their latest survey of the Laravel ecosystem and feedback directly from developers using it (and other) technologies.

Back in September, we partnered with LaraJobs to run a Laravel survey to see what types of projects people are taking on with Laravel as well as get some feedback on what the Laravel community could be doing better. The results ended up with over 1,600 submissions and some interesting insights.

You can see the complete results on this 2016 Laravel Survey Results page and thanks for everyone who took the time to fill it out.

Questions answered in the survey results include:

• What's the one reason why you selected Laravel over other frameworks?
• How many production applications do you have using Laravel?
• How many users does your largest Laravel based SaaS have?
• Are you able to find the quantity and quality of Laravel developers you need?

For each question they've shared the results (bar charts) and provided a brief commentary along with a list of things people suggested as additions to the Laravel framework.

To start off the new year the Laravel News site has posted a list of 80 tutorials, packages and resources they've shared with the community over the past year.

As 2016 is coming to a close it’s a great time to look back on the year and see just how much progress has been made. Laravel had a busy year with 5.3 being released, Laracon, updates to all the components, and now gearing up for the Laravel 5.4 release.

To look back on the year I’ve put together a list of some of the hits of 2016 and arranged them by month so you can get a quick overview of all the highlights.

There's lots of good content posted here and it's interesting to see all of the developments in not only the Laravel community but also the wider PHP community (including the fifth birthday of Laravel in June). Check out the full post for the complete list and links to each post.

On the Zend blog they've posted a retrospective of 2016 and some of their most popular articles published over the last year.

The audience has spoken. From Zend Framework 3 release to Zend Server with PHP 7, from IBM i to AWS, the top ten articles on the blog from 2016 cover a wide range of topics to help you deliver PHP applications rapidly, reliably, securely, both on-premise and in the cloud.

Articles that made the list include:

• 10 ways Zend Server boosts performance
• AWS 101 for PHP developers
• Zend Framework 3 release
• PHP 7 is gaining momentum

Check out the original post for the full list. Predictably, most are related to Zend's own offerings but its good to see some other topics mixed in there as well.

In his latest post Jordi Boggiano (of the Composer project) has released his PHP usage statistics for the second half of 2016 based on the information gathered during Composer installations.

It's stats o'clock! See 2014, 2015 and 2016.1 for previous similar posts.

A quick note on methodology, because all these stats are imperfect as they just sample some subset of the PHP user base. I look in the packagist.org logs of the last 28 days for Composer installs done by someone. Composer sends the PHP version it is running with in its User-Agent header, so I can use that to see which PHP versions people are using Composer with.

He compares them to the statistics from May 2016 showing some interesting but not unexpected changes, mostly in the growth of PHP 7+ versions. He shares a few of his own observations of the results and encourages library authors to start focusing on PHP 7 functionality rather than 5.5/5.6 compatibility. He also shares a secondary data set - the PHP versions that libraries require that, surprisingly, is moving a lot slower than the actual PHP version adoption.

On the Laravel News site there's a new post talking about a survey that's being put out by the LaraJobs site/service with questions covering the current state of the Laravel community.

The Laravel community is growing fast and we thought it’d be interesting to see what types of projects people are taking on with Laravel as well as get some feedback on what the Laravel community could be doing better.

If you’re a Laravel developer or in charge of a Laravel team and have a few minutes we’d love for you to take the survey.

The survey will run for a few weeks and at the end, the results will be tabulated, analyzed and shared on the Laravel News site. Even if you're not a Laravel user, you might want to take this poll (don't worry, it's anonymous) and share some about why you don't use the framework - there's a few questions about that too.

Michelangelo van Dam has posted a review of a recent conference he spoke at - the PHP Srbija Conference 2016. it shares a bit about the conference in general and some of his own experiences as a speaker.

This past weekend I was invited to speak at PHP Srbija Conference 2016 which was held in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia in the south-east of Europe.

He details some of the travels he took to get to the conference, some of the other speakers in attendance and the area where the conference was held. He also covers some of the sessions that were presenting including the keynote from Chris Hartjes and talks from PHP notables like Sebastian Bergmann, Rafael Dohms and Marco Pivetta. He makes a definite recommendation to attend future events to anyone out there not able to attend this year and how he felt privileged to be a part of this year's conference.

Each year the StackOverflow site asks the developers that use its services to participate in a survey with a wide range of questions. They've just posted the results of their latest round - the 2016 edition.

This year, over fifty thousand developers shared where they work, what they build, and who they are. You are about to read the results of the most comprehensive developer survey ever conducted. We asked them 45 questions. Key highlights include the following:

For the first time, more developers are using Mac than Linux as their primary OS. Only 7% of developers identify as "rockstars". Most developers prefer dogs to cats. (But not developers in Germany.)

The results of the survey are broken up into several main sections, each with their own statistics (and graphs for some) showing the results:

• Developer Profile (including Geography, Age, Experience and Education)
• Technology (includes Most Loved/Dreaded/Wanted, Top Paying Tech and Development Environments)
• Work (including Job Priorities, Salary, Teams and Remote/In-office)
• Community (Visit Frequency, Motivation and Asking/Answering)

You can check out the details these results in the full page output.