A lot has been written about the PHP Community. How it is an integral part of why PHP is not dead. About who is part of the community. About how it helped people become better developers. About how people improved because of the community.

And most of that is about the PHP language. Almost all of us came for the language. But what makes the PHP-Community so special for me is that a lot of the people stayed for the friends.

Friends that are beyond “everything is fine”. Friends you can count on and friends that actually take care for each other.

Whether that is people enquiring about the health of others just because they were suddenly not that active on Twitter anymore. Or people making plans to more closely engage with someone to help them through a rough time. Up to realizing that there are people talking about their health issues openly in chat-rooms or in blog posts.

And I think it is great that we as a community stand together in good times as well as in bad times.

We for sure have our differences. And we can fight! Over almost nothing!

It starts with Tabs vs Spaces or VSCode vs. PHPStorm, and doesn’t end at deprecating dynamic properties.

We are also capable of toxic behaviour. There are some people that are challenging the community in every way. And there are even some that we had to say “no” to. To be able to become more welcoming and more empathic.

And especially in bad times, it doesn’t matter whether we have a background in WordPress, Laravel, Symfony, Drupal, PHP, or whatever else we started out with. What matters is that we are not afraid to say that not everything is fine. And that there are people that take care of each other beyond mentoring through the next development challenge. People that help each other out. No matter what!

And it gives me a tingling feeling that I can be a part of that.

Thank you all for providing such an overall safe space.