The philosophy outgrew the project that produced it. This site is where it lives now — independent of any language, package manager or vendor.
Why a separate home
OTAKU was written inside PHPRise, a PHP foundation. That origin was an accident of the first implementation, not a property of the idea: the rules talk about indentation, collections, dependency direction and contracts, and every object-oriented language can express them.
Keeping the manifesto inside a PHP organization made two mistakes at once. It implied the philosophy required PHP, and it made the PHP repositories carry a copy of a document that was not about them. PHPRise now links here instead of duplicating it.
Author
Written and maintained byEsdras Schönevald, Lead Software Engineer and maintainer of PHPRise. The philosophy comes from two decades of building payment, identity and healthcare systems — and from the recurring experience that the expensive part of software is never the code you write, but the structure you keep.
The intellectual debts are listed on the personal site: Object Calisthenics (Jeff Bay), Clean Architecture (Robert C. Martin), DDD (Eric Evans), the Unix philosophy, Conway, Parnas and Dijkstra.
License
| Part | License | You may |
|---|---|---|
| Text of the manifesto and guide | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Share and adapt, with attribution and the same license |
| Code samples | MIT | Use, modify and sell, with attribution in the source |
Attribution: link to https://otakumanifesto.org and name the author. That is enough.
Contributing
The source is public atgithub.com/esdras-schonevald/otakumanifesto.org. The site is a static Astro build — no runtime, no database. Translations live insrc/i18n/; the rules are data, so every language renders the same table from the same source of truth.
- Corrections (typos, broken links, wrong code) — open an issue or a PR directly.
- New examples in another language — welcome, provided the rule is unchanged.
- Changing a rule — open an issue first. The rules are intentionally hard to change; that is the point.
Versioning
The philosophy is versioned by date, not by semantic version. A rule is never silently edited: changes are announced, discussed and reflected in the guide with an example of what changed.
| Version | Change |
|---|---|
| 2026.10 | Second edition: forty measurable rules, cyclomatic complexity as the primary metric, TypeScript, and translations into six languages. |
| 2026.10 | First public edition outside PHPRise: five pillars, three shapes, cross-language guide. |
| — | Earlier internal drafts lived inside PHPRise repositories. |