Bref is backed by null, the company

Bref is an open source project that helps build serverless PHP applications. I started the project in October 2017 after discovering AWS Lambda. Over time, the project turned from an experiment into a tool used in production by multiple companies.

But since the beginning, I knew Bref was not like my other open source projects. Serverless is a movement that is changing our industry. It has good sides and its rough edges, but what I love the most about it is that it simplifies our jobs as developers. Soon everyone will be able to deploy and run applications, no matter their skills.

Because of that, Bref is a long term project. Unlike other open source projects that I maintain in my spare time, the vision I have for Bref requires time and commitment.

To give you an idea, in 2018 I tracked the equivalent of 26 full days spent working on Bref (the reality might be more around 40), i.e. 5 full-time weeks. Of course I wasn't paid for that. You can multiply that with your daily rate to get an idea of the amount of money I have invested in Bref in 2018. As of June 2019 I know I have already topped that for 2019.

This is why in January 2019 I created a company:

I hope you like the name!

Besides doing consulting work on PHP projects and application architecture, null is backing Bref to make sure it has a future for the next years.

At the moment that means that I can afford to work on Bref at least 2 days per week, as I have been doing since the beginning of the year. I am working on finding solutions to expand that and even pay more people to work on the project.

If you are a company interested to sponsor Bref, feel free to get in touch.

For those who have been following closely, one step we will take in the coming weeks is to move Bref from my personal GitHub account to the Bref organization on GitHub.

Slightly related, and I'd like to finish on that: for many months now Bref has been much more than just my contributions.

• Bubba from Signature Tech Studio has been a major contributor for the build scripts of the PHP runtimes (and he is also building a very nice Laravel integration for Bref), and his colleague Joseph has been welcoming newcomers and providing support in the Slack channel.
• Neal Brooks has contributed improvements to the Symfony integration and the documentation, and he has been spreading the word about AWS Lambda and Bref to countless meetups and conferences (the next one being Laravel Live in London).
• Alan Trope working for Sua Música has contributed a lot of improvements for high-performance applications, the latest being ALB support.
• Holger Woltersdorf is working on an open source project used by Bref: https://github.com/hollodotme/fast-cgi-client, and he has been very helpful to integrate his work and improve whatever could be improved.
• Rob Allen has been writing a lot of material to get started and learn about AWS Lambda and PHP, including Bref.
• the Enoptea team lead by Gaultier Boniface has helped Bref from the very beginning 👋

There are also many more contributors, thanks to all of them.