Happy Birthday phpugmrn!

8 years ago, we started an experiment: Is there enough interest in the Rhein-Neckar region for a PHP meetup? We set-up a meetup.com and a Twitter account and started making some buzz.

From my experience, I knew we needed a good speaker for our first meetup. So I approached my good friend Marco Pivetta to see if he was up for this challenge. He was, and as always, he did a great job sharing his Doctrine knowledge and a rant or two.

Since then, we've organized the meetup every other month, and even the pandemic has not stopped us. The pandemic even gave us more traction; we had attendees from all over Europe, and occasionally even a friend from Japan did join.

At the beginning of this year, I decided to switch the meetup back to an in-person meetup. Again, knowing this requires a strong start with some fantastic speakers, I reached out to my friends Thijs Feryn and Łukasz Chruściel to see if they are up for this challenge. Both said yes. We had an amazing first in-person meetup, and many more followed this year.

All of this wouldn't been possible without bitExpert and Dots United, who have been supporting and sponsoring the event from day 1. THANK YOU!

Also, a meetup without attendees or speakers would be pretty boring. If you ever attended or spoke at one of our Rhein-Neckar meetups: THANK YOU!

If you are from the Rhein-Neckar region and looking for a meetup to learn about anything PHP, then join us. If you are a speaker and looking for an event to test a new talk? Let me know. Happy to host you.