PHPers is one of the largest PHP developer communities in Poland — a network of meetups running in cities including Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, and Trójmiasto. Each chapter brings together local PHP developers for talks, discussions, and networking around the PHP ecosystem.

On 27 July 2015 at 18:00, the first PHPers meetup in Toruń took place at Krajina Piva, Rynek Nowomiejski 8. I co-organised it together with Szymon Skowroński. Starting a new city chapter meant establishing a regular meeting place for PHP developers in the region — and 57 people attended, with another 34 marking themselves as interested.

Talks

Three talks covered a range of PHP topics:

  • Leszek Prabucki — Podstawy programowania obiektywnego w PHP (Basics of objective programming in PHP)
  • Łukasz Lubosz — Blackfire — inteligentny profiler (Blackfire — the intelligent profiler)
  • Leszek Krupiński — Co PHP? zepsuje w Twoim kodzie (What will PHP? break in your code)

Sponsors

The event was made possible by support from Cocoders, ecenter.pl, and Krajina Piva, who hosted us.

Why community matters

Organising events like this is something I value alongside day-to-day development work. Building a local developer network means better knowledge sharing, stronger connections between developers in the region, and a more active local tech scene. The 91 total RSVPs for a first-ever meetup in Toruń showed the appetite was there.

The full event details are on Facebook.