One year of phplx

One year ago...

Was exactly one year ago - December 6, 2012 - when the first phplx meetup happened. The first surprise we had was that the meetup sold out in less than 1 hour. We didn't expect that happened so fast, for us was a win. For the first meetup we had a lot of sponsors - Flag, Tomorrow Today, Jetbrains, Sauce Labs, O'Reilly and Geeklist - and also three talks, three speakers and about 70 attendees! At the end the feedback from attendees was fantastic and we got some suggestions to improve, saying this, what could we ask more?

Today's we can say that we reached lots of goals and some of them we didn't expect at all. Tomorrow is the phplx anniversary meetup and also the last of 2013, we planned a full day event with talks and hacking to celebrate the 1st of many birthdays (we hope) of phplx! Note: the event is already sold out.

A bit more of history

Before the first meetup, more or less 3 months earlier, I started my idea of running a PHP UG (user group) - in Lisbon, Portugal - in a regular basis.

The goal I had in mind was simple - gather the PHP community monthly to share knowledge, experiences and to hang out - and this is the same goal we have today.

But everything got started when I thankfully attended to LXJS 2012 - and you ask - what the hell is a javascript conference related to PHP? The answer is simple, was there where I met Samuel Gordalina and we end up founding phplx, also I met other people that comes regularly to the phplx meetups. After that we had two organization meetings with people interested in the initiative - at Irish Pub in Cais do Sodré - to define the name of the UG, the structure of the meetups and other related things.

It took off and we started with three organizers - me, Samuel and Francisco Costa - and two volunteers - Benjamim Alves,  Francisco Almeida.

Today some of them left the organization, some had new projects to work on others don't have time. Now we are four organizing - me, Samuel, Luís Santos and Ricardo Melo - and we welcome anyone who wants to participate in the organization of phplx - if you want to help just ping us.

Regardless who is now organizing the phplx meetups, everybody should celebrate today's day and we are all to be congratulated for another goal reached! Happy birthday phplx.

The future

At least we hope next year to be better or equal than the past one. We are very thankful to everyone that makes phplx happen, organizers, sponsors but specially to speakers and attendees without them we wouldn't have meetups.

Next year we will try to maintain the same regularity regarding the meetups and also try to do more drinkups. We also have some plans for other events but we will only share more information when we have it!

There are two things I would like to see happening next year with the PHP portuguese community.The first one is people step up to give talks, is always difficult to find someone to speak. The second one, depends on the first one, I would love to see more Portugueses giving talks at International Conferences! It's not that hard, you just need to practice and phplx is a good start.

We would love to see other people taking this initiative off - by creating more php user groups - in others portuguese cities like Porto, Faro, Coimbra, you name it. If you want to do it let us know and we will help as much as we can to get things off the ground. ;)

If you have any suggestion or ideas please share with us! We would love to hear them!

Sponsors & partners

We are very thankful to all our sponsors and partners we had and to the ones that still with us. Regardless the sponsorship level without them probably phplx wouldn't happen, or at least wouldn't happen in the same conditions.

So in name of the phplx team we want to thank them all - Flag, Sapo, Microsoft, Servergrove, Github, O'Reilly, PTisp, Jetbrains, Sauce Labs, Travis CI, Geeklist, Tomorrow Today, UniPlaces, IEEE ISCTE IUL Students branch, Nomad PHP, Lisbon MongoDB UG, MongoDB formerly 10gen and Active Media  - the order has no meaning.

Finishing with some statistics

One year of phplx in numbers:

• Number of meetups: 11
• Average attendance per meetup: 34
• Total number of speakers: 15
• Total number of talks: 26
• Number of drinkups: 1
• Followers on Twitter: 121
• Members on Facebook group: 250
• Google+ followers: 78
• Meetup.com members: 114
• Total number of sponsors/partners: 18
• Youtube channel (since end of August)
  • subscribers: 33
  • videos published: 13 (October and November meetups are in the queue)
  • total views: 1060
  • estimated minutes visualized: 2404
  • talk with most views and minutes viewed: MongoDB: Indexing and Query Optimization
• Website
  • total page views: 6648
  • total visitors: 4496
  • total unique visitors: 2613
  • total countries: 65