Burlington, VT PHP Users Group

2009 was the second full year of the Burlington, VT PHP Users Group. We had some fun meetings and presentations including:

January

Jason Pelletier gave a presentation on CSS for Developers.

CSS for Developers

View more documents from jason.pelletier.

February

Aaron Carlino demonstrated SilverStripe, an open source CMS/framework built in PHP.

March

Special guest Paul Reinheimer gave a presentation called “Easy Problems are the Hard Problems” taking an in-depth look at the easy/hard parts of building web applications.

April

Rob Riggen gave a talk on website performance optimization.

May

Rene Churchill gave a presentation on MySQL database optimization.

July

Matthew Weier O’Phinney gave his Play-Doh: Modelling Your Objects presentation.

Play-Doh: Modelling Your Objects

View more presentations from Matthew Weier O’Phinney.

August

Matthew Weier O’Phinney presented again in August, this time giving a hands-on unit testing crash course [ODP].

September

September’s meeting was a casual get-together instead of a formal meeting and presentation—a change of pace from the typical meeting format.

October

I gave a talk geared towards PHP beginners.

November

November’s meeting fell on one of Zend Framework’s Bug Hunt Days. Held monthly, Bug Hunt Days are designed to encourage the community to help triage and resolve issues in the framework. Matthew Weier O’Phinney guided us through effective bug reporting and taught us how to contribute patches. As part of Bug Hunt Days, my first Zend Framework patch was accepted, a small addition to the documentation.

December

December marked the second birthday of our local PHP Users Group and that month’s meeting turned out to be a fun social event.

Our users group also won a free pass to ZendCon ’09, and Jase Roberts was the lucky recipient. He joined fellow Vermonters Matthew Weier O’Phinney, John Valance, and me at the annual PHP conference.

The Browser

Jonathan Butler started a program on our local community radio station called The Browser. It’s “a show about the people who bring the world wide web to [Burlington, VT].” Jason and I were on the show twice—once in February and again in August.

Town Meeting Day Vermont, ACM-NE, and Tagnabit

The first Tuesday of March was Town Meeting Day here in Vermont. Citizens throughout Vermont gathered together to elect local officers and vote on budgets. As an experiment we put together a website, tmdvt.net/09, to aggregate content from social media sites around Town Meeting Day Vermont ’09. If you used the appropriate tags in your tweets, Flickr uploads, blog posts (if indexed by Technorati), YouTube uploads, and bookmarks on Delicious, then your content showed up on the website. I wrote a post recapping some things we learned from the experiment.

As a result of that project, Bill Simmon and Seth Mobley from Vermont Community Access Media (VCAM) approached us about doing something similar for the Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region (ACM-NE) conference they were organizing here in Burlington, VT. We built acmne.net/09 for the conference and it was a big hit. I spoke on a social media panel (which Liz Schlegel moderated) and helped with a social media workshop at the conference. Colin Rhinesmith, who was on the panel with me and also helped with the workshop, posted a good summary of the conference on his blog.

We then took the idea from Town Meeting Day Vermont and ACM-NE a step further, creating Tagnabit—aggregating tweets, photos, blog posts, videos, and bookmarks for any arbitrary tag. Bill Simmon wrote a good blog post on how Tagnabit could be used.

Jelly/Coworking

I was excited to see Jen Mincar open up a coworking space, Office Squared (o²), here in Burlington, VT in 2009. I think it will help bring more cohesiveness to the local technology community since many of her customers work in technology-related industries. As a precursor to its opening, we hosted a Jelly at Found Line in July, inviting entrepreneurs and freelancers to work in our studio for an afternoon. Here are some photos from the Jelly and another one at the Burlington Free Press.

Vermont Code Camp

September saw the first ever Vermont Code Camp, bringing together people from local technology communities around .NET, PHP, Ruby, and Python. The event was a huge success with 85 attendees and 19 sessions. I had a small part in organizing the event but the real credit goes to Rob Hale, Julie Lerman, and everyone else who organized, volunteered, and presented. I also gave a presentation on Resource-Oriented Web Services as part of the code camp.

ZendCon

ZendCon is the biggest conference of the PHP community, and this year’s event was my second ZendCon. What can I say? The talks were excellent. The people were even better. I ended up co-presenting at the UnCon with Michelangelo van Dam and Anna Filina on the role of a PHP user group.

Moving On

2009 seemed to be the year for people in the PHP community to change jobs. Following that trend, I made the move to Found Line full time last month, leaving Vermont Oxford Network. As I said before I’m very happy to have more time to focus on our clients’ projects and to work with free/open source software and open standards full time.

Work

2009 was a busy year. Some of the work included:

• helping ThinkFlood launch their RedEye product by building their website and eCommerce application (see the Rackspace Cloud blog post on the launch);
• building a news article management tool for NEHP‘s website;
• creating Vermont Public Radio’s Artist Mug Gallery, Champlain 400, School Closings, Search, and States of Marriage pages;
• launching Common Good Vermont; and
• developing and maintaining a line of business web application for the University of Vermont.

Phew—a lot to say! I hope you had a good 2009, and have an even better 2010.

I’m relatively new to the PHP community myself. Sure, I’ve been a PHP developer for about eight years but I hadn’t really been involved in the community until I started our local PHP users group two years ago. There I met many talented local PHP developers including Matthew Weier O’Phinney, now project lead for Zend Framework. I had actually started using Zend Framework a little while before I met Matthew not realizing that one of the developers lived here in Vermont. I then went to ZendCon ’08 which was my introduction to the international PHP community.

I think one of the things that makes the PHP community so strong is that we’ve had to build the community ourselves (my part in building the PHP community has been relatively tiny). Having had some involvement in other technology communities, I’ve seen the kind of support that companies like Microsoft can provide to strengthen their respective communities. During the “Meet the Zend Team” session at this year’s ZendCon, Keith Casey asked what Zend was going to do to further support user groups. I was very happy to hear this question asked.

I’d like to see Zend do more to support user groups — although I don’t have any room to talk with Matthew being a regular attendee and presenter at our local user group. In fact, as a response to Keith’s question Matthew reiterated his offer to present at other user groups if he was in the area (which, frankly, was a much better answer than the rest of the Zend team gave). Chris Cornutt published a blog post today asking what role should companies take in the developer community ecosystem. I don’t think it’s any one company or organization’s job to support the PHP community. Help is most certainly welcome but I think our strength is in doing it ourselves.

Participate in the backchannel. Last year’s conference attendees generated over 1,500 tweets using the #zendcon hashtag and reached the top 5 trending topics on Twitter three days in a row. Over 2,200 photos were posted to Flickr using the zendcon08 tag as people traveled to, attended, and departed from the conference. There were also many blog posts and the #zendcon IRC channel on freenode was quite active. You can participate by using the Twitterslurp of ZendCon 2009 or using tagnabit.net/zendcon (I’m the co-creator of tagnabit).

Attend at least one ZendCon UnCon session. The unconference is, “a community-driven event focused on interesting topics of the moment, and engages everyone at whatever level they can.” No paid speakers, no ridged structure, just sessions of interest to the community by community members. Keith Casey did an awesome job organizing last year’s unconference and I suspect this year’s unconference will be just as interesting!

Attend a few sessions outside of your normal topics of interest. There were a few sessions I didn’t go to last year that, retrospectively, I wish I had attended. One that comes to mind was Ben Ramsey’s Distribution and Publication With Atom Web Services talk. At the time I didn’t know a lot about the Atom Publishing Protocol but now it’s a topic that I’m very interested in. You never know what you’ll learn if you introduce yourself to some topics you’re not currently familiar with.

Spend some time in the “Hallway Track.” ZendCon isn’t just about attending sessions by some of the most respected people in the PHP community, it’s also about meeting many of these same people and others from the PHP community. The PHP community tends to be very friendly, so don’t be shy! In fact, you will probably have already “met” some of these people in the backchannel. If you see someone who you’ve talked to on Twitter or in IRC, don’t be afraid to say, “Hey, I know you from Twitter/IRC!”

While I was writing this blog post, Keith Casey published a great post with some dos and dont’s for your first conference. Definitely check it out before packing for ZendCon!

This year I’m looking forward to seeing people in person again that I met last year and meeting others who I’ve only talked with online. The session lineup is looking good and I’m also very interested in attending some of the unconference sessions again. If you’re going to be there, let me know so we can connect.