This is a guest post by Mike Simonson talking about his unique experience visiting the php[world] conference in December 2014.
Mike Simonson
Whoever bumps into Mike discovers quickly that he is an enthusiatic – talkative – and open-minded guy. Even if the computer science has always been part of his life, Mike really considered turning this passion into a full-time activity when turning 20. Knowledge-addict and true believer of the open-source mouvement, he is more and more involved in the PHP community participating to conferences and meeting inspiring people, which motivates him to contribute back even more. See you at the social!
Recently, I was given the opportunity to attend the first php[world] edition thanks to in2it who offered me a ticket. The conference took place in Washington DC from Nov 10-14 2014. I was really excited to go there and spend time with people that I appreciate like Michelangelo van Dam, Davey Shafik, Evan Coury or Michelle Sanver.
Some of the talks seemed very promissing too.
Talks
For sure I wasn’t disappointed by the quality of the presentations.
- Larry Garfield did an awesome job with “From zero to Silex”. Here is the git repository of his presentation.
- Ryan Weaver explained the common ground that is shared now between various php frameworks in “PHP Components and the Great Framework Kumbaya”.
- And Rafael Dohms had two nice talks about composer and coding style.
Diversity
The organisation team managed to provide attendees an outstanding experience thanks to a bunch of good ideas.
Firstly, they had speakers from a broad range of different php community projects: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Symfony, Zend Framework, Laravel, Silex and Sculpin.
Secondly, planning a minimum of 30 minutes between each talk to extend the depth of the discussions and meet new awesome people was another nice idea. The presence of people new to php without IT background was particularly interesting.
I believe those ideas really contributed to the quality and diversity of the converstations.
Peer programming
During the Hackathon night, I was able to work on Sculpin with its creator Beau Simensen (awesome, right? ;p). What a better opportunity to make sure your pull request gets merged quickly? The funny thing is that he kept thanking me for all the work done (You’re welcome! BTW thank YOU for all the thinking! ;p ).
Fun
What is a php conference without a social? We spent the night playing games until I had to give in to sleep. On top of that I had the chance to go to a basketball match with @coderabbi, Raphael Dohms and some others. Thankfully Raphael was able to enlighten me on all the basket ball rules, which turned the evening into an unforgettable moment.
All in all I spent an awesome time with awesome people and I want to give a special thanks to Michelangelo and in2it vof who gave me the oportunity to participate!
Community involvement
In2it believes in community involvement and we always do what is in our powers to make a difference. Come and see us at a user group meetup or conference, who knows we have other nice things to raffle.
