For three days Askr correctly diagnosed a queue lane nothing was draining — and told only its own stderr. 1.6.0 moves that conclusion into the API and Prometheus, per lane.
A release about the bugs that don't crash — a cache delete that missed duplicates, a sandbox that warned instead of refusing, a canary that guarded the wrong reloads, and lock-free reads that a benchmark argued for before the lock was touched.
Full-page caching is rare in PHP because nobody trusts it. Askr 1.4 adds a cache oracle that reports what's actually safe to cache, and automatic dependency tagging so invalidation stops being a maintenance job.
Askr 1.2 is about refusal: fleet-wide rate limiting in shared memory, a canary gate that drains and quarantines a bad deploy, a response cache that survives reboots, and askr tune — a command that measures your app and writes the config.
Askr 1.1 brings Edge-Side Includes, PURGE/BAN and declarative cache rules in-process: cache the expensive page, keep the cart live, and invalidate by URL — no Varnish, no second hop. Plus two security findings four code reviews missed.
Askr hits 1.0: embedded PHP 8.5 in a Rust binary — web server, queue, scheduler, cache, and broadcaster in one process. Frozen surfaces under SemVer, four code reviews, and 23 million requests of proof.
A field journal through Askr 0.9.4 → 0.9.6: agentless SQL logging, a leader-elected metrics rollup, per-request OpenTelemetry traces, HTTP/3 over QUIC, a -full build, and askr-laravel on Packagist.
A field journal through Askr 0.9.0 → 0.9.3: stale-while-revalidate, RSS-based worker recycling, shadow traffic, native queue autoscaling, a durable L2 tier, and the broadcasting driver that finally deletes Redis from Laravel.
Benchmarking Askr against FrankenPHP, PHP-FPM, and RoadRunner — the confound that nearly fooled me, and the one metric that rewrote the roadmap.
How Askr — a Rust application server that embeds PHP in-process — became the most efficient way I know to run Laravel: no FPM, no nginx, no Redis, no certbot. Just one binary.