July Coffeeshop Hangout

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

PHP Releases
  • PHP 5.5.1 / PHP 5.4.17 / PHP 5.3.27
  • Q: PHP 5.3 Reaching End of Life?  A: Yep!
Framework Spotlight
  • Silex 1.0.1
  • Symfony 2.2.4 / 2.3.0
  • ZF 2 2.2.1 / 2.3.0 end of August
  • Laravel 4 – still.  But, making a lot of good noise it seems
Event Reminders
  • 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
New KC Co-Working Place
Open August-ish
Read more about it in Silicon Prairie News
Run by volunteers/tennants run
1624 Westport Road
 KC PUG Changes
  • 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!
Participating in a Nomad PHP session

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.

Anyone using Hiphop?

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.

System monitoring

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

What’s it like to be in a Hackathon?

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 blown away by PHP App Engine excitement

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!

June Coffeeshop Hangout

Some things we discussed today:

Graphing Options

Event Reminders
  • Lawrence Coders Hack Day – July 11, 2013
  • Nomad PHP (virtual) – Laravel 4, Phil Sturgeon
    June 27, 2013 8:00 pm (CDT)
    We also talked about Laravel as a good candidate for starting a new system
Radial Search Options

Thank you for the great discussions everyone!

If you have things you want to make sure people know, be sure to add it to the comments below!

May Coffee Hangout

Some things we discussed today:

Upcoming Events

Great networking opportunities of in KC

Major Updates in the PHP world:

We had lots of great conversations that didn’t necessarily have a “link” to go along with it.  If you didn’t go, you should have been there!  If you did thanks for the great discussions!!

If you have things you want to make sure people know, be sure to add it to the comments below!

Red Nova Labs Hosting in October

Red Nova Labs
4830 Rainbow Blvd
Westwood, KS 66205

View Map

I wanted to thank our new friends at Red Nova Labs for hosting our meeting in October!  We will still be meeting at 2:30pm on the third Saturday, but this time in the city of Westwood!

They have generously agreed to open their doors to us–even for our usual Saturday time slot! Just park in the lot across 49th street, walk in the front door and down the steps–you can’t miss it!

Be sure to check this website or the meetup page in the months to come for details on our meeting location.

July 21, 2012 – Today’s Thriving PHP Ecosystem

Link

Most people who actively work with PHP every day rarely confine themselves to just PHP.

PHP Developers have access to a nearly dizzying array of tools, packages, language features, QA tools and countless frameworks and styles to develop with.  In this Tour of the PHP Ecosystem, long time PHP enthusiast Dan Holmes will attempt to highlight many of the projects and developments that have come of age in recent years.

Whether you have long settled on one particular style or framework for development, or just looking at PHP for the first time, we are sure you will spot something fresh you hadn’t seen before.