 So I'm here today to talk to you about the state of the PHP community Now when I mentioned that this is probably what you were expecting a discussion of pain suffering despair agony But what I want to give you today is a talk of hope. I Want to paint a different picture of the community? That includes hope growth and future So before we do that however for everybody else in the room who didn't chuckle at that first slide We need to review the pain that the PHP community has been through To know where we're coming from and we've certainly had a fair bit of it First of all, there's internals a very special special place Internals has had its history of vitriol of being unwelcoming It's a place where definitely there have been plenty of flame wars and even personal attacks PHP 7 itself Getting PHP 7 out Had a lot of pain. There was a lot of controversy about it. There was controversy about scalar type hints Whether we wanted them or whether we didn't and once it was decided we did want them What type of scalar type hints they would be how they would be implemented when all of that was going down? A lot of controversy came up about voting techniques people campaigning for votes The timing of requests that were being put in and people may be trying to put Requests in for a vote beyond time periods and other people can looking at that differently There was just a lot of mess happening around that time There was even a lot of controversy about the name itself PHP 7 versus PHP 6 I will fully admit I was one of the instigators there I was the one who actually wrote up a very large email to the list Explaining the reasons why I really felt it should be PHP 7 which led to Zev Saraski Making the actual RFC and bringing it to a vote We've also got fig the framework interoperability group Fig has seen a lot of fireworks over its days Not that long ago. They actually had for the first time in their organization Had to have a vote and go to a vote about potentially pushing a certain member out The vote ended up failing Everything is fine however There was a lot of infighting that came with that right there were a lot of people upset that There was even a need to go to a vote people that were upset that the vote didn't happen or didn't happen the way that it did There were a lot of people who left fig at that time a lot of people who have not come back There's also been a fair bit of shutdowns happening within the community Which maybe not everyone is quite as aware of I run conferences for a living I run technical conferences specifically. I run PHP conferences the way often that People who run PHP conferences get the word out the easiest way to get the word out is to reach out to all the user groups Because you reach out to the user groups you let them know they let all their members know it's easy. It's easy to get the word out. However That puts us conference organizers in a unique place to sort of see what's happening amongst all the user groups out there and across the world There has been a lot of groups that are going inactive a number of groups that have completely shut down Being that I am from the US I have a couple specific examples from there that I can easily refer to in my mind New York PHP, which was one of the biggest or is I believe the biggest user group dedicated to a specific city Not a greater region for PHP Did not meet for 11 months straight Baltimore PHP did not meet for 18 months straight St. Louis PHP absolutely shut down and went inactive and is gone Of course, they did that six months before we moved to conference there However, a lot of that has been happening The community itself has also been fragmenting we've been fragmenting in a lot of different ways in Some parts it's people moving over to auxiliary groups people from the PHP community Moving to the Drupal community or the WordPress community or the Laravel community and separating themselves from the greater PHP community We've also been fragmenting in other ways IRC versus slack for example a lot of the older original community always hung out on IRC Now lots of people have left IRC to be in slack and that has caused some tension There's even age fragmentation happening in the community I mentioned being part of the older PHP community and I have the white hairs to show it unfortunately PHP has been around for a very long time There are people that have been in the community from the beginning and there are now new people joining the community every day And a lot of times the new folks in Have different ideas of what they want to see out of the community than people that have been doing it for 20 years Because we get stuck in our ways And then there's Reddit um To quote George Lucas you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy Um reddit is a wonderful place. However, unfortunately The PHP subreddit Tends to be the place Where all of the angst all of the anger all of everything negative about PHP comes to surface and comes to a head And unfortunately it is a very public place. So everyone sees that All right, we've talked about all of these pain points But before we go any further I want to now talk about the amazing and awesome things that does exist in the community Because it is not all pain. There are wonderful things going on Most importantly are the people in the PHP community The fact is PHP is filled with amazing people in my opinion unlike any other community In fact, I often try to compare the people of the PHP community To being very similar to how PHP itself is unlike any other open source programming language In fact, I know some people will disagree with me and in fact some people in this room may disagree with me But tough i'm up here speaking PHP is unique as an open source language in my opinion. It is the only truly Open source programming language and what I mean by that is yes There are lots of other open source programming languages ruby and python and pearl and more All of those other open source programming languages, however Have one person or maybe a small core team That actually decide the future and direction of that language If you've ever looked on the internals mailing list, you know no one is in charge of PHP PHP operates as an open democracy Anybody in this room anybody in the world can have a great idea for what they want to see happen With PHP a direction. They want to see PHP go You can come up with that idea. You can join the internals mailing list. You can throw that idea out there You will have to defend that idea But you can make a change and make that change happen in PHP Now the fact is i'm talking about all these wonderful people and because of that I don't want This talk to be just my voice I want you to listen to the words of some others as well So first of all we have Samantha Keone's She wrote an article for php architect magazine Talking about community and in it she wrote Sometimes it's hard for me to understand how warm and welcoming people can be This community opens itself up to absolutely anyone who is willing to give even a little something back It's remarkable The community has given me so much and I feel like I can't come close to giving back in kind I think back to my very first talk feeling taken aback by all the support I was getting from these new friends What did you expect one person asked me? I didn't expect this Joe Ferguson was being interviewed by cloudways who has interviewed a lot of php developers recently And in that interview they asked him about community And he said the power of the php community comes from the willingness to share We share code successes and sometimes heartbreak I have seen so many friends in the php community and we all seem to have this common goal of helping anyone better themselves There's a million other quotes. There's a million other people I did want to pull a couple quick ones from twitter if you search for php community You can find an amazing amount of things on twitter But just a few of the ones that really drive this home to my mind We have an entire twitter account php hugs Dedicated to sharing the love of the community Their pinned post is if you want to give kudos to a personal project in the community tag it with php hugs I'll retweet and share the love Michael Beckwith attended his very first php conference and he posted I have felt very welcomed by what parts of the php community Are here for php crews. It's my first php conference outside of the wordpress bubble And one of my favorite ones from zev sirasky one of the architects of php3 Was there are 13,289 times more love than hate in the community It's only that we humans tend to focus on the bad and not the good Now we talked about the negativity that happened with getting php7 out But the fact is php7 is out and it is amazing We have scalar type hints. We have return types Most importantly, we have a 70 to 300 speed increase by just installing php7 It is faster than hhvm for many use cases now There are also a lot of amazing projects being built by members of the community For example, we have phpug A great website you can go and see Every single user group in the world see when they're meeting anywhere you travel It's easy to go and look and see where you could attend a user group We have php map which builds on top of that which not only lists The user groups out there But you yourself can put a dot on that map for you showing you are a php developer and where you are And that you are willing to connect to anyone And to help and to collaborate and you can find php developers this way And then I talked earlier about irc versus slack But we now have this amazing phpug slack channel If you are not part of it, I charge you all to go join it go to php.ug and on the bottom there is a link To get an invite to this slack It is I am not sure how many thousands of people are on it at the moment But not only is everyone on it, but a number of different php user groups have all made their own sub channels on it And are having conversations and there's channels to learn about conferences and call for papers and all sorts of things And this is just a sampling of some of the projects that the php community has been putting out for the community We also do a lot of really good things For example, there has been a big push in the community recently to bring a lot of awareness To the mental health problem that exists Not just in our community, but the developer community at large A lot of this push has been from this Project non-profit that has started up open sourcing mental illness started by ed finchler up there And it has been amazing the amount of help that is created the now speakers They have been providing to various conferences to talk about this very important issue The php community is also amazing at helping each other I have lost count of the number of times I've heard of someone in the community in need And people stepping up and helping them out I want to highlight one of them just because it's the most recent one that comes to mind that was gigantic It was for this man here, Jeremy Kendall Jeremy and his wife had just had a new baby and not long after Jeremy found himself without a job Unfortunately for the job market he was in That job did not come quickly And a month went by and a couple months went by and I believe at least six months went by And again, they had just had a baby. They had all sorts of expenses. They were needing to meet Jeremy himself Would not step up and say he needed help But someone else in the community who knew him and had been talking to him was a good friend realized How bad the situation was That person started a go fund me campaign for Jeremy and his wife to make sure that they could have the money They needed to take care of their baby Thousands of people went and donated tens of thousands of dollars I was talking with Jeremy afterwards Um, and he was almost in tears saying how literally without the php community He did not know what they would have done if they would have made it that it was literally that bad And that's a very big case But it's amazing all the small things that we do to help each other out as well I can only speak for my own twitter feed But it is constantly full at least once a day I see somebody saying hey, I have a job opportunity for someone like this is anyone looking And conversely I see people going like hey, I know an amazing senior dev or an amazing evangelist Who needs one and people helping each other out Now I also wanted to talk about growth Because php is growing We are working through those various pains So for example Internals In my opinion Internals has kind of seen the light It has been calming down a lot lately Yes, there are lots of people with very strong opinions who will argue very strongly for that We are all geeks. We like to do that However The amount of personal attacks and flame wars that come from that has really calmed down People have realized that they need to keep a professional tone I think part of that is somewhat maybe not completely but somewhat due To another project formed by the php community externals.io Which is a very public very easy to access very pretty archive Of the internals mailing list the internals mailing list has always been public But you had to know the magic url to go through and it was really ugly and a lot of people therefore didn't go look at it I have actually seen for example in externals.io help out on reddit Where in the past someone would just post something if can you believe what so and so said on internals and a flame war erupts on reddit Now when someone posts that I often see someone else going well Here's actually the link to what they said on externals.io And everyone actually goes and reads it and goes oh actually that wasn't that bad. You're taking it out of context And so it has helped out In fact throughout the php community I see a lot of new beginnings happening and blank slates As people are seeing that changes needed and growth has to happen For example right now is sort of the time for figs new day They are working on restructuring Fig 3.0 They are reformulating themselves to be much more of the standards group for php that php Always wanted them to that the community always wanted them to be and that originally they did not want to embrace that concept In fact the community is really sort of waking up We're coming out of this extended hibernation There was a law that happened And if you look back the law started sort of in that build up to php7 in about the year before it As things started to roll forward as a lot of drama started to come out About php7 and all that negativity a lot of people started to drop off People just went you know, I don't want anything to do with this right now. I'm stepping away for a bit Then php7 itself came out And a lot of the people who were pushing so hard and working hard to get it out Stepped back because they were now tired Well, that's been a while now php7 has been out for over a year Things are starting to come back all of those developers who had stepped out for a while are now starting to come back Things are starting to wake back up for example I talked earlier about how both new york php and baltimore php had not met for 11 or 18 months respectively I am very happy to announce that within the last couple months both of those user groups have started having meetings again So what does the future hold then for the php community? Where can we go from here? The problem is we have a problem of size Now what i'm saying is that we've really gotten too big But at the same time We're thinking too small And what I mean by that is that php is huge We are the elephant in the room We run 82 of the web We have enterprise adoption. We are everywhere. We won If there was a competition of what programming language would run the web It's us The problem is That means we aren't the hip new thing anymore Nobody talks about us. We're just php that other programming language that people use What happens then Is by the old school definition for those of us here with enough white hair to remember of what we considered the php community originally The php community was the internals team And their friends and followers on Which all hung out in the phpc irc channel That was a very small community and that's what Decades ago now Was considered the php community That mental image of the community Can't expand to contain 82 of the web They're estimated to be five million php developers in the world Causing that 82 of the web to happen We can't have five million developers. I'll be everyone's best buds So that concept of community Couldn't contain the growth that php was seeing and so what happened? We broke apart. We formed islands People went off into these sub communities Drupal wordpress laireville symphony In fact a number of those sub communities Grew big and grew strong and in many senses grew stronger than the php community itself We're here at one of the premier php conferences with 700 people in the room Drupal conferences get 2,000 to 4,000 people Wordpress conferences get into thousands as well and there's a word camp every single weekend somewhere that has a few hundred people These other communities broke off grew big and grew strong The thing is great work in the last couple years has happened to bridge these islands In fact, I want to tell a story about the Drupal community itself Drupal a few years ago Actually started a campaign called get Drupal off the island They realized this had happened to them. They realized that they were being very insular They were rebuilding things. They were not looking into what was happening outside in the php world They realized that Drupal was built on php and therefore it is very important to be connected and have these two communities be connected Now there was a big push. There was a lot of money put behind it. There was a lot of evangelists sent out to different conferences Did Drupal get off the island? No Because it's a great island. It's very pretty people like it But what happened was these bridges got built We now have on a regular basis php developers attending Drupal conferences. We have Drupal developers attending php conferences In fact at Drupal cons now there is a dedicated php track and a dedicated symphony track Something they had not had in the past In fact, the reason there's a dedicated symphony track is that Drupal 8 came out as part of this get Drupal off the island push And Drupal 8 is rebuilt where they've thrown away large sections of the original Drupal code And pulled in symphony and some bits of Zim framework and a few other things primarily symphony And replaced those parts of Drupal with that Because they realized why do we for example need to write our own router when symphony has a wonderful one We can build on top of we can contribute back to symphony symphonies contributions come back to us We all make each other's products stronger the problem is There is a bigger task ahead of us And that's reaching what i'm going to call the third ring of developers Now what do i mean The way i'm looking at the php community right now there are three rings So first of all you've got the core community Now my modern definition of the core community Is much bigger than what the definition was a few decades ago The modern definition involves yes the internals people and people in irc chat rooms and in slack chat rooms It involves every single member of every single php user group out there It involves every single one of you and every single person who attends any php conference in the last few years That's a fairly large core community But those are the people who are directly connected to the php community Then you have this other ring around them This is what i'm going to call the extended community This is now all of those other extended communities such as The application communities and the framework communities the people who are in the wordpress and drupal and lara vell communities Who still consider themselves? I am not a php developer. I am a lara vell developer. I am not a php developer I am a wordpress developer and that's fine There's part of the extended community because we have those bridges. We can still reach them. We can still connect with them But you this is a countable number of people It'd be hard to count, but it's countable You could go to meet up find every single meetup somewhat related to php count them find every single Conference that is in some way related to php count the number of attendees they have you can add all that up That number does not come to five million It does not come even close to that Maybe you count a million. Maybe you count 500,000. Maybe it's smaller The fact is There is a very large outer ring around us Of people who are developing on php People to whom php is just another language And who are not connected to the community at all at the moment And they are really hard for us to reach And part of the problem is that when that outer ring starts to get close To the inner rings If they see negativity If they see bickering If they forbid read reddit They are not going to see a community they want to be a part of And the thing is this outer 50 percent They're always asking this one question Why? So this photograph is from a conference I attended called that conference Makes for wonderful phone conversations when you're trying to book a hotel room You book a hotel room for that conference. What conference? That conference It's a polyglot web tech event. So there are people there From with all sorts of different programming languages as their base language It's also a huge conference thousands of people. It's also at the water park Which is why it's a huge conference with thousands of people I was at this conference one year speaking And they have an open spaces UnCon area And someone had signed up for a slot just writing php question mark At the time I was a member working with php architect and I was there representing php architect So I was there in my bright orange shirt with my logo on it And I went oh someone has something about php. I should go sit in on that and see what they're talking about So I went there and I sat down There were about six or seven guys there They were all very young in their early 20s And they were talking about php and what they're doing with it and all this and it became obvious to me listening to what they were saying That they were all people who had very recently within the last couple years graduated from college With a degree in computer science or something similar Went out to get their first job being a programmer The job they happened to find was at some company where the company said by the way we program in php And they went okay fine. That's a programming language. I can program They had never been connected to the community They didn't know a community existed. We started to talk about that They asked me what I did I'm like, oh, I'm with php architect. Can't you see on my shirt here? Um, we're the magazine that's been around for 13 years. It was 12 years at that time for 12 years Um dedicated to php and they all looked at me in almost in unison said why Why is there a magazine dedicated to php? Why would anyone do that? I'm like because it's cool and you can learn things and then we got to talking more And one of the guys there was like, yeah, I come to this conference every year Because it's the only conference. I know of that has stuff about php in it And I was like, where do you live? He's like I live in dc. I'm like I run a php conference in dc. That's dedicated to php In fact, there are hundreds of conferences dedicated to php around the world And again, his answer was why? He had never thought that someone would make a conference about just php To him would be like having a conference just about c or just about assembly There are a few of those out there, but not many not like we do right And the same thing happened we started talking I was like, hey Well, what user groups do you belong to and a couple of them were like, oh I belong to this one of that one. None of them mentioned a php user group And I'm like, why don't you belong to php user group? And again, they said, why? Why are there user groups dedicated to php? I'm like, are there assembly user groups? Are there c user groups? I'm like, well, no, not really. And yes, if you google you'll find them But hardly any compared to what we in the php community are and that's the problem is php started As this small tight-knit community of people working on a really cool thing We've now expanded to the point that we are just php To anyone that is not originally part of that community We are just another programming language and therefore they don't even think That there would be a community or why a community would exist around it It's just this programming language that in some cases has been around longer than they were born And so it's just always been there so I'm going to randomly say 50 percent of developers therefore Are outside of our reach They don't belong to a user group. They don't attend php conferences. They don't consider themselves community These are the people going out there and reading crap about php on reddit and believing it therefore These are the people who are the nine to five job workers Who again graduated college got a job. They go to work. They sit down in the cubicle by themselves They write php code all day. They go home. They are absolutely the people who could benefit so much By connecting with the community. They're people that we would love to help Show them the things that we can do The fact is we need to reach out to these people At the same time we need to be positive within our own community We need to not give them a reason to see anything negative We need to show them the amazing community that we are We need to give them an amazing community We need to make a welcoming environment for them Reach out Find these people pull them in And show them the love that the php community can have for them Thank you