Our first UG meeting was held on 5th August 2014. It started out quite well with an attendance I would later find out was actually decent, fifteen people. All would have been well but having never really run a UG before I had the assumption that attendees would spontaneously start chatting, bonding and networking.

This of cos did not happen and in as such within the first 30 minutes of life of the UG, I had already messed up! Thankfully a colleague and good friend of mine, Kennedy Kirui was around. A master of public engagement he had absolutely no problem working up the room and getting everyone to good cheer. Later on he taught me some lessons on facilitating conversations among the attendees.

The next few meetings proceeded rather well except for a rather disturbing fact, the numbers we’re dwindling. For a group with 15 members this was a disturbing trend to say the least!

At this point I had a chat with one of my mentors on the unfolding situation. He asked how I usually run the meetings. I said

1. Welcome all attendees
2. I Introduce topic of the day
3. Talk a bit about its background
4. Ask questions and have members discuss the answers given
5. Set topic for next meeting and close

All the while my mentor was nodding approvingly (or at least I thought so) he then asked “What was the name of that UG again”? I said “PHP UG” he then responded, you are wrong this is “Chenchas UG”. I was shocked at this statement, what could he possibly mean? I didn’t have to think for long, he clarified, “You set the topic, you lead the meetup, it seems you are everything!” I was flabbergasted, I wanted to argue but I knew he was right, I had changed the group from its original mission to my own personal sounding board! Something had to change.

That was the turning point in how activities in the group we’re carried out. We now have a structure that is more like

1. Call for speakers for meetup based on set theme
2. Introduce speaker to meetup
3. Group listens to presentation
4. We all engage with the speaker
5. Member vote for theme for next meeting

Since then growth has been stable with steady growth from meetup to meetup.

We are still learning and iterating, maybe next year we will land on an even better schedule! Till then I resolve to continue serving our community to the best of my ability.

PHP UG Kenya is a group of PHP developers fiercely committed to changing what it means to be a PHP developer. It’s our dream to equip all our members with the knowledge and tools they need to deliver great service to their businesses and community. We do this by hosting talks, running coding camps and mentorship programs.

As of this writing the community is currently 150 member strong and growing consistently.

I have met hundreds of you on conferences and user groups, and talked to even more online, the community is what makes PHP so awesome, thank you for always being there for everyone, and for spending your free time and energy on Open Source software and building our community. 

Speaking of thank you’s. Thanksgiving is an american tradition that I always thought had a good meaning. Expressing what and who you are thankful for is so very important, but why should we do it only one day of the year?

In mid 2015 I set out a noble goal, I decided to thank someone that I appreciate every single day, and give them well deserved compliments along with it. Often I thanked friends for being who they are and for listening to me, but sometimes I went deeper. I searched for e-mail addresses and honestly felt a bit like a stalker, to thank people in the community for their hard work and it was all worth it.

The replies that I got really did surprise me, when people replied that I made their day, it made my day. I put nearly no effort into it and simply said what I was feeling in my heart. What surprised me was that most people felt surprised by my e-mails and messages, because not nearly enough people ever thank them. I think that is sad, especially when I was thanking big contributors of open source projects. Surely, it should be normal to thank them for their hard work they do? Apparently not.

Maybe it’s time for the community to try out my gratitude hobby for a while, make it a daily habit in the new year to come, and experience the gratification of gratitude, because if such a small thing can make someones day, why wouldn’t you do it?

I started writing PHP a little over 4 years ago, right after I got my degree. The first job I got was managing Joomla sites. Looking back on it, it seems a bit silly, but I was so over the moon. I was a web developer!! All my dreams had come true and I’d made it.

Really, I was more of a content manager, user debugger, css tweaker. I used little to none of my CS background (and honestly very very little PHP). Still, you’ll always remember your first, and that was mine.

It was another two years before I started to get involved in the community. For the two years between that first job and when I started to get involved, I was in a silo. I was usually on one or two person teams working on a project with little to no official project management. I worked in an echo chamber where the only thing echoing back at me was Google and Stack Overflow.

When I first started to step out of my echo chamber I was cautious and a little lost. People like Taylor Otwell, Ben Edmunds, Phil Sturgeon stood out like beacons. Rather noisy, but wicked brilliant and very helpful.

I remember the first time I got a tweet from Phil; I almost died (Funny story: he now babysits my kids). I nearly died again when Taylor asked me to speak at LaraconUS. It was my first conference, my first time on stage in front of that many people, my first in person foray into the community.

In the last two years I have learned more, taught more, travelled more, been more inspired, made more friends and met more role models than in the two plus decades of my life before that. It’s been a magical journey and it’s been a privilege to be on it.

But that’s not why I’m part of the community. It’s not to travel, meet nice British babysitters or make new friends. I’m passionate and honored to be here because I remember.

I remember the silo, the echo chamber, being gobsmacked and in awe. I remember the fear of first starting out here.

It’s easy to forget that, once you’ve gotten comfortable. When you’re working with a team of forty engineers and you have other like-minded people at the tip of your twitter stream that you can ask for help.

The fact is that there are thousands and thousands of people that are right where I was a few years ago. Small team, no sounding board, not a single rubber duck in sight. Hopefully they’ll make their way out of those silos as I did, and they’ll start to find their way into the herd. And when they do, I want to be there. I want to help them and make them feel welcome.

Because really, this is home. Home and PHPamily.

We walk so many of the darkest paths in life in solitude. We are right to honor the virtue of self reliance but we forget how loneliness eats away at the heart of our humanity. When we are alone, we are impoverished and weak. Dorothy Day, the great social activist of the early 20th century wrote that “[w]e have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.”

The love that Dorothy discovered is not unique to her adopted community, the Catholic church. It can be found wherever people of like mind come together in good faith to help and support one another. I found it in the community that has come together around PHP.

I spent the first half of my career isolated in the long loneliness. It almost broke me, but I learned in time to not be afraid of letting other people into my life. I learned that I had a lot to gain from building relationships with other people. More importantly, I learned how much I had to offer.

Discovering the PHP Community
My first exposure to the larger PHP community was php[tek] in 2013. Michelangelo van Dam had offered up a free ticket to my local user group and I just happened to win it. At the time, I had no idea of how my life was about to change.

The technology conferences I’d attended in past were all about vendors pushing products, trying to make sales. Everyone was there to take something from someone else. Giving was not on the program.

When I arrived in Chicago, though, I discovered a community the likes of which I had never even imagined. A community whose conferences are about teaching and sharing, about reconnecting and reuniting. The sessions I attended didn’t push me to buy, they offered to teach. The people I met in the hallways saw me not as a potential client, but as a potential friend.

The Community
A community is nothing more than a group of people who commit to one another’s well being. When you are part of a community, you are never truly alone. I’ve seen this community of ours live up to that commitment time and time again. We have supported our own in financial need. We have grieved for those lost too soon, and worked console those they left behind. A community is nothing less than a family that you choose.

By the time I left Chicago, I knew I had found a new home. For the first time in my career I knew a group of people who challenged and inspired me. Not just to be a better engineer, but to be a better person. I found a place to belong.

Joining the Family
The magical thing is that it’s so easy to join this family. Every time you blog about a problem you solve, or answer a question on a mailing list, you are choosing to be part of the community. When you attend your local user group or fix a typo in an open-source package’s documentation, you are choosing to be part of the community. When you speak at a meetup or share a helpful library on github, you are choosing to be part of the community.

That’s all it takes!

Together We Are Strong
The playwright Tony Kushner wrote that “one is a fiction,” and that human life springs from networks. The destitution and fragility that come with isolation melt away when we open ourselves up to love and fellowship. By embracing community we become part of a greater whole and learn to push each other forward towards a better future for us all.

I love to hang around with my friends, being on a party or have any kind of company around me, but on the other side I avoid starting any kind of conversation. I still don’t know if I’m just shy or an introvert, there are others who can judge that better, and I know that a lot of developers are struggling with that. So you can imagine how a usergroup or conference normally looks like for me? Of course I enjoy the talks, but hide from every break, networking-event or the even so highly praised hallway tracks. But as already mentioned, if a conversation has been started I enjoy it, I would just never break the ice.

I visited my first usergroup only four years ago and learned a lot about new technologies on that evening, but also left the building as soon as the talks had been over, to avoid starting to talk to anyone. I was always keen about learning something new, e.g. read a lot of books and have been active in online communites, but going to a usergroup is all that compressed into a small 30 or 45 minutes slot. Which is great, to get a look into something new. I was also impressed by these cool guys on stage talking about their fancy technology stuff and everyone was looking up to them.

From that on I visited this usergroup regularly and also went to other events like unconferences and barcamps, to learn new stuff all over the time. Finally, I also wanted to be one of these cool guys on the stage. But it took me two more years to pick a topic, where I had at least some experienced knowledge, to not look dumb when being on stage. Then I brought all my courage together, to talk at a barcamp. Already weeks ago I prepared all slides and did a dozen of rehearsals. Anyway on that day when I had to give the talk I was literally shitty nervous. I even hated giving the talk itself, but from that point on some people knew me and a bunch of them were coming after the talk and started a conversation about exactly that topic. So it was perfect to have a topic to talk about, and I could even choose it as I gave the talk.

Starting to talk definitely changed my life as a developer. I enjoyed  the conversations afterwards so much, that I applied to a bunch of more local small events. At the same time Davey Shafik also offered his help in writing an abstract. Thanks to him, I also had now a professional abstract. Btw for help on writing an abstract there’s a fabulous page these days at helpmeabstract.com. Now I got even accepted to bigger commercial conferences, where I have never been before as I would never pay so much money for it. :p

All that went extremely fast. Just a year later I was invited to talk at an intercontinental event, have been allowed to write several articles for magazines and even got offered a contract to write a book. Lanyrd claims that I was speaking at over 30 events in only two years, no matter how many events it have been, I’ve never learned so much interesting stuff and never met so many cool people. Talking about cool people, what I also experienced is that these guys on stage aren’t that cool at all. They’re just normal developers, so when you see one of them, just sit by them and if they don’t talk to you they might not be arrogant, but just be even more shy than you are. 😉

Since then I always try to concinve people to give a talk on their own. But don’t worry if you’re nervous, that’s a point for most of us. Even after all that talks I’ve made, I’m still super nervous before most of the talks. It’s also weird that I fear small groups of 10 – 20 people way more than big audiences of hundreds. Another point I often here is that people say they don’t have something to talk about. That’s not true! Even if there’s nothing interesting for you in your daily job, what are you currently looking at in a side-project? You’re not an expert in that? That’s not a problem, you might become an expert by talking about the topic. I frequently just state in the beginning that I don’t have too much knowledge and are very open for any additions from the audience. Still most of the audience will learn something new, as they have no experience at all in that topic, and I as a speaker will also learn something new from the one expert in the audience who is adding his thoughts. As long as you don’t claim being an expert noone will condemn you, if you don’t know the answer for a specific question.

Last but not least, of course before starting to speak and during all the time, I also tried to learn a lot about the speaking process itself. So I gathered a bunch of links about speaking, which I want to share with you. I hope there’s also something interesting for you in it!

• http://videlalvaro.github.com/2012/06/conference-speaking-tips.html
• http://blog.sqisland.com/2012/06/how-to-be-confident-speaker.html
• http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/how-to-fix-your-presentations-21-tips.html
• http://writing.jan.io/2013/05/10/how-to-give-the-killer-tech-talk—a-pamphlet.html
• http://blog.slideshare.net/2013/07/22/5-powerful-ways-to-open-a-presentation/
• http://blog.slideshare.net/2013/07/29/5-powerful-ways-to-close-a-presentation/
• https://speakerdeck.com/bipuldeb/seven-deadly-tricks-seven-ways-to-storytelling
• http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2013/09/12/10-things-you-should-never-say-during-presentations-2/
• http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2014/04/07/what-your-conference-proposal-is-missing/
• http://frankchimero.com/blog/suggestions-for-speakers/
• http://speaking.io/
• http://matthewturland.com/2014/07/15/speaking-resources/

Seeing what happend in the last 2-3 years by actively participating in the community, I’m happily looking forward to 2016 and also wish you a happy new year!

At this memorable times we are facing the general availability of PHP 7.0.0. It is a huge celebration occasion for everyone along the core team, folks who test, report bugs, research security, document, publicize or contribute in any other ways from around the world. As much as bringing the huge performance improvements and many new features like scalar and return type hints, 64-bit consistency, new Exception hierarchy and a lot of others, all the more PHP 7 reveals, how considerable the community foundation actually is.

Every contribution counts. It were not thinkable to see PHP reaching to the top in the extent observable today without the strong support of so many, be it individuals, open source projects or even companies. The society of PHP is something that supplements PHP as a programming language, and that has a very special value and power. We, all around the world, having many various interests and speaking many different languages indeed speak same – PHP.

Let’s drink a glass champagne on the PHP community! The next PHP version is already on the horizon, and we know what is the force that keeps driving it up.