In a recent post the fifteenth anniversary of the XDebug PHP debugging tool was celebrated and lead developer Derick Rethans was presented with several tokens of appreciation from the PHP community. In this new post to his site he shares the experience (it was a surprise after all) from his perspective and thanks those involved.

This article was going to be about some upcoming features in the 2.6 release. Or rather, I was hoping to announce at least a beta release of Xdebug 2.6. Unfortunately, I couldn't find enough time to work on all the issues that I wanted, although I've made a little progress.

What I can write about, is a little mystery.

He talks about the initial invite from James Titcumb to meet him at his favorite whisky store and the eight special bottles that the community purchased to show their appreciation for his hard fifteen years of work on this invaluable tool. He lists out the types for those interested and some of the messages from contributors showing their appreciation. He thanks all of those involved.

And on the Xdebug front, there are plenty of bugs to fix, features to add for Xdebug 2.6, and undoubtedly Dmitry will be "breaking" some things in PHP 7.2 that I need to support in Xdebug as well.

Recently the Xdebug PHP debugging tool turned 15 and PHP community member Cal Evans wanted to do something special for the author, Derick Rethans. He started a secret fundraiser to gather contributions from all around the community and used the funds to purchase Derick several bottles of his favorite beverage. In this new post to his site Cal shares some about XDebug, Derick and a video of James Titcumb presenting Derick with his present.

There are a handful of tools that have actually changed how many of us code PHP. XDebug is one of those tools[1]. There is no doubt of the impact that XDebug has has on PHP developers and PHP projects.

Recently, XDebug turned 15. This means that the man responsible for XDebug, Derick Rethans, has been supporting XDebug for 15 years, for free. [...] So on this the (close to) anniversary of this product, many of us in the PHP community decided to do something to show Derick how much we appreciate it. Those that know him know that Derick loves a good Scotch. So we decided to buy him some.

Cal has the video embedded in the post (or here on YouTube) and offers thanks to the people and groups that helped to make the project successful.