After launching a couple PHP User Groups in Italy (Rome and Friuli), I started to feel kind of lost here in Dubai, a place that gathers together lots of talents but doesn’t have that much of knowledge-sharing culture.
Given this and the pro-active involvement of some of my colleagues from Namshi, I really wanted to see some sort of community raise in this desert.
So a couple weeks ago I opened a google group for the PHP User Group Dubai – pretty empty right now – which is the place where we’re going to discuss meetings, ask for support and chillax in a nerdy way.
Yesterday we had our first meeting, where 7 of us discussed on the directions that we should initially take to gain the attention of others in the development community and which kind of formats to use during our meetings; the main points that came out of the meeting are:
- we will try to meet once a month
- we will try to set and prepare the next meeting before the beginning of Ramadan (~10 July)
- everyone will try to bring a new joiner (friend, colleague, etc.) to the next meeting
- we will have a talk and a discussion after that, most probably in front of a dinner accompanied by some sheesha
- most probably, since not everyone is aware of the potential and benefits of automated testing, we will prepare a talk on PHPUnit
So, if you are a PHP developer based in the UAE – not necessarily Dubai – why don’t you subscribe to our PHP User Group Dubai google group and introduce yourself? Do you want to understand why testing your applications manually it’s a waste of your energies and of money of your company? Do you know about Twig? Have you ever tried developing an application with AngularJS and some HTTP APIs as the backend of that app? How can you integrate the JWS authentication mechanism in your PHP code?
It would be great to see you at the next meeting!1
- By the way, we will decide the date, location and topic of the meeting with a discussion in the google group ↩