Currently browsing phpc
Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:29 UTC
I recently moved to Nashville, and as part of that transition, I’ve taken the helm as the new organizer for the Nashville PHP user group. I posted what follows to the Nashville PHP mailing list, but I thought it would be a good blog post. Enjoy!
Six years ago, I founded the Atlanta PHP user group (along with a few others), and I’ve been organizing it since then. It’s been a lot of hard work to grow and develop the PHP community in the Atlanta area, but it’s also been rewarding to meet so many great people and to see them take interest in and become invested in the continued success of their PHP user group. I’m proud to have been a part of building that community to the point where it can sustain itself without my involvement.
Now, I’m in Nashville. A few months ago, I moved here to pursue a job with a local web start-up. I never had any intention of running the local PHP user group, but Will Fitch, the former Nashville PHP organizer, contacted me to see if I would be interested in taking over the reins. He had moved out of the area and was no longer able to devote the time necessary to keep the group growing. I humbly accepted the torch, and that’s why I’m now the Nashville PHP organizer.
There have been several incarnations of PHP user groups in the Nashville area over the past ten years, all with varied success. It is my hope to build on those successes and to grow a sustained community of members who are personally invested in seeing a vibrant and active PHP community in the Middle Tennessee area.
That’s a lofty goal that will require a lot of hard work, so I’ll need your help. Nevertheless, I’m up for the challenge, and I hope you’ll join me in growing this community.
First of all, a few matters of business:
- Nashville PHP will hold regular monthly meetings on the second Tuesday of every month at 7pm at the same location each month. I am currently solidifying this location, and I’ll let you know when details are finalized.
- June 8 at 7pm will be our first meeting. Location and topic TBA.
- Nashville PHP will continue to use Meetup.com as our central place for membership and meeting announcements and RSVPs.
- I’m dropping the discussion forums on Meetup.com in favor of a Google Group for discussions and job postings. Please join the Nashville PHP Google Group.
- Follow @NashvillePHP on Twitter for community status updates. Also, if you have a Twitter account and you want to be listed on the nashvillephp-devs list, let me know. I’ll add you.
- Join me on Freenode IRC in the #nashvillephp channel. If you’re new to IRC, read this basic IRC tutorial to get started.
- Employers and recruiters are welcome to post job opportunities to our discussion list. Before posting, please read the rules.
Welcome to the new Nashville PHP! I hope you’ll join me in making this community a success.
No Comments
Permalink
Tags: nashville, nashvillephp, php, phpc, phpcommunity, phpgroups, user-group
Fri, 18 Dec 2009 5:34 UTC
Six years ago, I became aware of the PHP community. I joined it three years prior to that.
I’m privileged to be a part of the 2009 edition of PHP Advent. This year, my post is about the PHP community. If you have any comments, feel free to leave them here.
No Comments
Permalink
Tags: advent, php, phpadvent, phpc, phpcommunity
Sun, 25 Jan 2009 2:42 UTC
We’re well into the New Year—24 days to be exact—and I’ve long since been putting off this post, but it’s not really a single post. Instead, it’s a collection of things that I’ve been wanting to say but have been putting off, and it’s a look forward to things I’m working on, would like to see happen, or would like to be involved with this year. So, rather than the obligatory look back at what I did last year, this is a look forward at what I’m interested in for the coming year (in no particular order).
First of all, I would like to offer some congratulations to a handful of friends of mine. These congrats have been a long time coming from me and are already old news to many of you. In no particular order, I want to congratulate: Andrei Zmievski on being hired as an Open Source Fellow at Digg; Jon Tan on taking a role as the new Creative Director at OmniTI; Cal Evans, who moved to the Netherlands to be the Director of the PHP Centre of Expertise at Ibuildings; Marco Tabini and Keith Casey for launching Blue Parabola, and Matthew Turland for joining them; Eli White for accepting a position at Zend as the Zend Community Manager/Leader & DevZone Editor-In-Chief; and last, but not least, Brian DeShong for his promotion to Director of Technology at Schematic.
Next, I wanted to take a moment to mention and promote the writing I’ve been working on. I didn’t publish a single thing last year, and in 2007, I published only one article, so I resolved this year to get off my ass and remedy this. In February, php|architect will publish my article entitled “Grokking the REST Architectural Style.” This article attempts to explain what Representational State Transfer really is by going beyond peoples’ fascination with designing URLs, using XML, and focusing on HTTP methods. Instead, I’ll look at the real heart of REST with hopes that readers will fully understand what it means to build a RESTful application. A fellow web services aficionado said of the article, “I think you expressed very nicely what the concepts are all about—and without a URL or HTTP verb in sight!”
Following the REST article, in March php|architect will begin publishing my monthly column “From the Cloud.” In “From the Cloud,” I’ll be looking at practical web services you can use, as well as exploring trends that are transforming the way we use the Web. Here’s a quick blurb from the column that describes its focus:
As the Web matures and enters its third decade of life, many services are turning to cloud-based models of data storage. End users are becoming more and more comfortable with the notion that their data lives in the ether of the Internet rather than on their personal computers. Finding that data, retrieving it, manipulating it, and using it in meaningful ways are the challenges that face the era of the intelligent Web. I hope you’ll join me each month as we explore these services and technologies From the Cloud.
Finally, later this year, php|architect will publish another article I’m working on that will take a practical look at using HTTP in your applications in a RESTful way. There may also be a book idea or two in the works for me, but more on that later.
Oh, and I also had the privilege of being invited again to write a PHP Advent post during the month of December. I wrote a post entitled “Practice Safe & Idempotent Methods.”
Furthering my ramblings in this post, I also wanted to mention some community projects I’m working on this year. As always, I’d like to see PHPCommunity.org evolve and grow into a real website that offers real value to the PHP community, so that’s on my list of things to do. I’ll post more on that in the future. In addition, I have some plans for Atlanta PHP this year that include a new website, incorporation so we can accept donations, and an event to occur later in the year, but you’ll hear more from me about this as the details are finalized. Inspired by my own writings for the “From the Cloud” column, I’ll also be developing a PHP library of classes for interacting with various web services. This began with the Amazon Web Services library in PHP project, but I’ll be migrating that elsewhere to be part of a larger project in the near future, so be on the lookout for that.
Last, but not least, I wanted to mention the website that I built for my dad over the holidays. He recently launched his own business, Small Business Resource Associates, that provides services to small businesses and commercial real estate investors. I did all of the HTML/CSS and PHP programming for the website, while my aunt did the design work. It was an interesting project for me because I haven’t really touched front-end (client-side) web development in several years (I stick mainly to back-end, server-side development these days), and I was proud that I was able to make a website that validates successfully as XHTML 1.1. Another interesting part of the site is that it has a blog, something that I don’t believe many in the financial services industry are doing, so I think that’s one thing that sets apart Small Business Resource Associates from the competition. If your small business is looking for a loan, business plan, business consulting, SBA help, etc., please check it out.
Well, that’s a wrap. I’ve got a growing list of topics I want to blog about, so I hope that you’ll be hearing much more from me this year than you did last year.
Happy New Year!
1 Comment »
Permalink
Tags: atlantaphp, http, php, phpc, phpcommunity, rest, webservices
Sat, 24 May 2008 2:08 UTC
So, my first conference of this year’s conference “season” has come to a close, and as a wrap-up post for the conference, I’d like to do something a bit different. I’m not going to discuss the sessions I attended or talk about the keynotes. Instead, I’d like to approach this post from the community aspect.
As a speaker at conferences, what often interests me most is in meeting with people, making new friends, and catching up with those I only get to see a few times a year (if that many) at conferences. I’m fortunate to have played a small role in helping to start and keeping alive the PHP Community project through the #phpc IRC channel on Freenode, and it is the members of the Community that I’m so proud to see attending conferences, taking initiative in organizing impromptu extra-curricular events at conferences, and even welcoming in new faces and new ideas. The Community ranges from end-users of PHP to core developers who take part in making decisions regarding the future of our beloved language.
At this year’s php|tek, I saw the Community come together in an exciting way, and, really, I think they provided a lot of the energy and enthusiasm that took us through the whole week, getting even the other attendees excited about the things going on at the conference and in the greater PHP community. From Christian Flickinger’s homemade buttons to Damien Seguy’s new batch of PHP and Oracle elePHPants to the #phptek channel on Freenode to tons and tons of Twitter updates to nightly trips to Shoeless Joe’s (and even the conference meme of changing the name of the bar on each new tweet), the Community played a large part in providing the conference with a fun and exciting atmosphere, and I commend Marco, Sean, Paul, and Arbi at php|architect for allowing and even encouraging the Community to involve themselves in this way. You guys truly rock!
The Community members who attend are really the unsung heroes of the conference, in my opinion. They aren’t necessarily speakers (though some are). They aren’t the PHP thought leaders (again, some are). Their companies don’t often pay their way to conferences. They make do however they can by organizing road trips, sharing rooms, etc. so that they can attend the conferences. I think this creates even more camaraderie and a closer bond between Community members. Without their presence, the conference dynamic would be terribly lacking.
So, while I’m now back home with my family, who I dearly missed while away, I raise my glass to the PHP Community members and to the organizers of php|tek. You know who you are. You all made this conference truly memorable for me.
Thank you, and I hope to see you again soon at another conference. 
8 Comments »
Permalink
Tags: php-community, phpc, phpcommunity, phptek, tek08
Tue, 11 Sep 2007 21:06 UTC
So, I’m here gearing up for php|works at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel near the Atlanta airport. I’m giving a 6-hour Zend PHP 5 Certification Crash Course tomorrow. Following that, I’ll play host to some speakers and conference attendees (as a sort of unofficial social coordinator—as if I have those skills) for after-hours dinner and drinks. If you’re interested in hanging out after-hours this week, look me up at the conference and let me know.
Also, I’ll be logged into #phpc on Freenode IRC this week along with many other conference attendees. The channel will serve as a sort of (unofficial) conference chatter channel to find conference goers, make plans, and make general mischief, heckling the speakers behind their backs. 
I assume there’s still time to register if you’re interested in attending.
No Comments
Permalink
Tags: conferences, php, phpc, phpcommunity, phpworks, phpworks2007, works07, zce
Wed, 22 Aug 2007 3:02 UTC
Last year, a substantial number of regulars of #phpc attended the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, so we decided to make #phpc t-shirts for everyone. This year, that number of attendees from #phpc has dramatically risen, and, again, we’ll be creating special t-shirts, this time using the original PHPCommunity.org logo created by Peter Jovanovic (with contributions from Richard Davey).
If you’ll be attending the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, and you’d like to show your support for PHPCommunity.org, then use this handy form to buy a shirt. Ligaya Turmelle will be in charge of handing out the shirts at the conference. If you can’t make it to the conference, and you’d still like a shirt, I’m sure Lig can work out something for you (like shipping). Just ask her on the IRC channel.
3 Comments »
Permalink
Tags: conferences, php, phpc, phpcommunity, zendcon, ZendConference
Thu, 12 Oct 2006 14:09 UTC
Since there will be a substantial number (something like 9 or 10) of #phpc frequenters in attendance at the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, we decided it would be cool to print up some t-shirts for fun and wear them at the conference. So, quickly, Aaron Wormus came up with a t-shirt design, and we’re ready to start printing them. Tuesday, October 31 will be the official #phpc wear-your-t-shirt day for conference goers.
If you want a t-shirt, please send an e-mail to tshirts [at] benramsey.com and include your size. This is how I’ll get a head count for the initial printing. I need a count soon, so don’t delay! The cost of the shirt will be about $13. I’ll bring them to the conference to hand out. If you can’t make it to the conference, and you still want a shirt, I’ll arrange for shipping after the conference (but go ahead and let me know you want one now).
3 Comments »
Permalink
Tags: conferences, php, php-community, phpc, tshirts, zend
