What a great meeting everyone!  GREAT turnout, and lots of fantastic discussion.  Here are some announcements and highlights I could grab along the way.

• Lawrence Coders Hack Day – Aug 29th
• Nomad PHP (virtual)
  Creating Realtime Applications with PHP and Websockets, Corey Ballou July 25th, 2013 8:00 pm (CDT)
  Practical Refactoring and Beautiful Models coming soon!
• Day Camp 4 Developers #6
  Non Programming for Programmers
  Docs, Agile Development, SCM, Estimation
  July 26, 2013, 9:00 am – 1:30 pm CST

• Steering committee – a new email subgroup to keep us on track
• Looking for new places – I’ve contacted JoCo libraries, others?  coworking spaces? Companies using PHP?
• Adding an Evening Meeting, co-working meeting?
• Looking for Sponsors –  If we can get a compatible place, would be nice to have pizza, soda, etc.  Probably need some guidelines
• Employer Spotlight – Highlighting the use of PHP in KC
• Members Directory – A place to put anything about you!

Eric discussed participating in the IRC back channel of last month’s nomad PHP.  Brought up PuPHPet – The amazingly easy to use, Vagret file builder for custom PHP vm’s.  Great to see such industry leaders hanging out to contribute.

Hiphop VM was discussed on the latest Ruby Roads podcast (Sorry, John, if you know the link, feel free to add to the comments section)

Of course, most of us can get away with just an opcode cache like APC or the OPcache into PHP 5.5 and ported to 5.4 and 5.3 via PECL.

John asked about small-scale systems monitoring that didn’t involve something massive like New Relic, etc.  Thoughts that came back were: Nagios + Check_MK, Cacti, What’s Up Gold, Big Brother, MRTG, Monit, Webmin with  WebminStats

Eric reported on his attendance in the Hack the Midwest hackathon. Had a great time, and encourages anyone and everyone to take part in the next one.

Eric’s report also wins the Best one-liner award: “Coding started and the count of oontz”

His advice to new hackathon attendees: Go in with a team, an idea ahead of time and have your dev environment ready to go.  Then spend about 12 hours to make your app and make it awesome, then polish and create your presentation.  You can’t bring in artwork or code, but you can bring in architecture and planning–so have that thoughts out, and bring that for sure.

PHP teams were rare, but there.  Nods and mentions were also given to other area hackathons such as Hack the Gigabit City and CforA’s Hack Kansas City

Google being shocked at how many people started using the Google App engine for PHP.  Read more about it.

We had so many other great conversations!!  Thanks everyone.  If you have things you want to make sure people know, be sure to add it to the comments below!