 So, about the PHP user group, in the beginning, that's all good stories in the beginning about actually some good stories, some other good stories to start with a long, long time ago. Yeah, but anyway. So in the beginning, as a load developer in my company, I was basically feeling a strain of actually working alone. A lot of you developers right now probably feel that way, some of you. Those who are more fortunate are probably working in a team. So I was kind of like that in your position, all alone. And I really wanted to be a support group, a team, a group of people I can share about my paints, all of my FMLs and all that stuff, and even to share some victories and even share some knowledge about what, and basically how I can become better at the aircraft. Because I think as a software engineer, I really want to be as good as I can be and deliver the best product I can for my clients and for the people that I'm working for. So I really wanted to have a support group for all the people I can meet together with. I've heard of these similar concepts being used by other groups. This concept called user group. So there were two groups that are around at the time, the Singapore Java User Group, which I've heard of but never actually met anyone. Actually I just met someone recently but they're probably disbanded right now. And the other one is the Singapore Ruby Brigade. We think nowadays they just don't go by Ruby SG. So these are two groups that were there back in 2007. So I thought it would be a good idea to kind of like try and start something on my own. So I did some googling around and try to figure out whether there's any existing user groups in PHP because I was doing PHP at the time so I really wanted to know other developers who were doing PHP as well. Turns out there were, but basically we're not the first PHP user group in Singapore. There were two other earlier efforts and by the end of 2006, they were both inactive as in longer. I couldn't even contact the person that was running those groups before. So I thought, okay, no one's doing this now. Why don't I just try something on my own? So I created a user group on Meetup.com which I thought was a cool idea. Meetup.com is a website you can go and discover and meet people, like-minded people of interest groups and stuff. So I thought programming is an interest of mine so I should start an interest group for PHP developers. So I did that in December 2006. I organised my first meetup on 11th of January which is 10 years from this day. I did the first meetup at Brewworks because I don't have any technical things to talk about but it's an interest group, right? I think beer is a very... beer is a good way to get people talking and meeting together. So I thought it would be good to meet people for beer, programmers like me who hopefully has free time on a weekday night. Turns out not many people show up. So I was a bit sad. About five of us sitting at Brewworks ordering some good food and having some nice chit chat. It was interesting. My regret was I didn't take a photo to memorise the moment because I couldn't find anything. My Facebook account was created in 2007 so I couldn't find any photos... mid-2007, so I couldn't find any photos way back from early 2007. Unfortunately. Yeah, so from that quiet beginning, that's where we started. This is how it looked like, the page that we... the page. Of course, it doesn't look like this back then. We didn't have that photo up there. So you can see here, January 11th, 2007, at Brewworks. At the time, I was the CTO of a small digital agency called Comworks. So I was like, hey, you know, meet people. But only five show up. So there were like, how many RSVP? There was, I don't know, there was like 20 people for RSVP, but four or five people show up. So it was okay. So as I said, there were no traction. Not many people came. So many months after that, I tried to do one in February, March, because in the early days, when you started meetup.com group, they would try to tell you to fix a day or a month to organize the meetup, and it would automatically create a meetup for you, you know, in the past. So it would like, it would force you to have a meetup. I don't know. It was free back then. I don't think it was set up, and it caused involve. So anyway, so I created... okay, right, you created one in February. It just kind of duplicated the first month's description to the second month, and I, okay, fine. So there was many months where I tried to have a whole more meetup, so I just couldn't find people. I think, yeah, basically there wasn't much awareness about it, I didn't know where to go and to tell people about it. But fortunately for me, in 2007, the tech startup scene was actually getting started as in a lot of people coming from the valley, especially students from universities. To note, it's a group of students who went through the NOC program, and US Overseas College program. So a lot of them came back from the valley and they were like, hey, we ought to bring the startup culture into Singapore. And from there, I joined a couple of their meetings and I got in contact with a lot of people. And in 2007, October, there were one of the groups, E27, they're still around. Back then it was called Entrepreneur 27. So you can check out their website, I think it's still there. So if you Google for Facebook Developer Garage, you'll find a mention of it way back in 2007, 24th of October. Their blog was still running there, and the photos are no longer there, but it's still there. So I can find the page. That's how I remember the date, actually. So anyway, yeah, so I thought of myself, of course, it was around that time when Facebook first opened up their API. So Facebook had an SDK, an API, a graph API where you can talk to the Facebook data, all the stuff there. It was around the time when they started launching that and you can build games on it. There was when the E27 started this, did this Facebook Developer Garage to kind of bring together game developers who were working on the Facebook platform. So I thought it would be good avenue to kind of tell people about, hey, the PHP user group exists, can come with me. So what I did was I created a Facebook group for the Singapore PHP user group, and also printed some name cards which kind of gave out at the end of the Facebook Developer Garage. So I made an announcement there, and the membership in the Facebook group just skyrocketed. There were like a few hundred people joining the group. Today we have about 3,000 members on our Facebook group. I believe half of them are bots. But it's still a good number. There you go. So I thought, hey, it would be a good idea to kind of do another Meetup again. So I tried to organize one in November. This time instead of using Meetup.com, I used Facebook.com to kind of like create a Facebook event. Of course I also created a Meetup.com event and a Facebook event at the same time. So I thought maybe I can compare the number of people who RSVP and who actually showed up. So it turns out when I created the event I was kind of like half joking. I wasn't really sure I could actually get enough people to come because I had so many months of disappointment where I tried to organize but no one came. So I was like, ah, I don't need an event. I don't need a venue now. I'll just put it up there first. Then it says to be confirmed or something like that. So I created an event. There was no venue. The RSVP number just hit skyrocketed. About 40 people RSVPed. I was like, whoa, okay. We have a lot of people coming. I think we need a place. But we don't have one yet. Right. Small panic. So fortunately for me I have friends. I mentioned earlier there were other user groups around. And Singapore Ruby Brigade was one of those that was around. I kind of like asked them, hey, you guys organized a meetup at SMU, right? Could you guys introduce me to somebody who I can talk to and maybe get a place. So Mr. Lee Yao Long, who is a lecturer at the School of Infosystems at SMU, he introduced me to the object-oriented programming society in SMU. It is a real society. What are the student groups there? I think they may have changed their name. I don't know why they are still around. But there is a group, there is a whole society created to learn about object-oriented programming stuff that we take for granted nowadays. Anyway, yeah. So I thought, okay, great. We have people who are willing to come. And we have a venue. So now I need to find speakers. So I was thinking, since this is the first one, there are so many people I should speak. So I should talk a bit about something. I can't remember what. Oh yeah, I was talking about. Okay, so basically I wanted to, from my experience and probably my intuitive understanding of the community, I felt we should have topics that cater to three groups of people. The first group are beginners, people who are new to PHP. The second group are people who are professionals who have been doing PHP for a while. And also business folks, people who are kind of on the lookout for PHP people to hire. So I basically found people who were able to talk about three things. So this is the brochure I prepared. Kind of cheesy. But yeah. So basically I spoke about PHP 101. And we got this guy Raymond Ng. He was talking about Ellen. So we got this Raymond who will talk a little bit about how PHP and your business, how you can use open source technologies and stuff. And we had Yuzin Chua who talked to us a little bit about security, security in PHP. Yuzin was a student which I kind of hired for doing one of his term breaks. And he went on to do other things and he basically runs a blogging platform called ping.sg. And also he, at the time he was also CTO of a small company called Vigis. Small startup which was, I think, IGEM funded. Which is kind of cool. Anyway, so there were three of us. We basically, you know, first meet up at SMU. It was in November 2007. And this is us. Hand wavy stuff. Are the photos clear? Okay, okay. So three hand wavy stuff. You can see a lot of my gestures there doing this and that. There was me back in the day, 10 years ago. And that's me with the V-sign. So I'm hurt right now. This V-sign is a bad thing because people can take photos of it and get my thumb print. And I think it's too low grade to get anything from there. So yeah, I think it's pretty safe. So I actually have stickers printed back then. You can see the color, the blue stickers, green stickers and yellow stickers to kind of like designate. Are you a beginner? Are you looking for, are you a newbie? Are you a professional? Are you like an entrepreneur? Or business folks looking for, it's kind of like a way, informal way of getting people to start a conversation with each other which I felt was important to get people talking to each other. And we have some more photos of the attendees. Shunheng, I think you can see a photo there when you had long hair. Yeah, over there. Yeah. And this... Did you have anything longer than that? Yeah, I have longer hair. Yes, I think I did have a little more hair back then. I believe I had more hair back then. And I would use wear shirts. Anyway, so I had a good fortune in the early days to have bloggers who attend our meet-ups. And a lot of them were doing our live blogging as we were talking about stuff. And we had blogger friends who were really into photography and they took a lot of photos for me. And this, they came and came on a little comic strip to tell me about how I am gesturing and all that stuff. So hopefully I don't do that much of that anymore. Hopefully. Anyway, so as I said, so I experimented with the format. Because in the first meet-up we had three speakers. By the time the all three speakers finished, we ended up about 10 o'clock, which is kind of late. So no, no, no, I think we should try and manage this a bit. So we thought in the second meet-up we should try experiment. And what we did was we broke it into two tracks. So there were two tracks, two rooms happening simultaneously. And we have four speakers on that day. So that was on the second meet-up. And there was also some problem with the venue because back in those days SMU actually, it was the term break. It was December holidays. So they were having a term break and the aircon turns off at 7 o'clock, which is about the start time of our meet-up. So I thought, oh shit, we can't use SMU anymore. But fortunately for our friends in E27, they got us a place at NUS extension, which is at Park Mall. It's kind of like NUS. They have NUS at the campus for adult programs, post-grad programs in the city, near Dobigo MRT. So they had a facility there, which is kind of nice. So this is how it looks like. It's a pretty big room. Yeah. And you can see here, photos of the speakers. Where's Leicester? Over there. So his first time, Leicester spoke at one of our meet-ups. He was talking about building WordPress extensions, if I'm not wrong. Was it? Was it? You guessed so. Yeah. So I was introduced to him and he was like, oh, he's one of the most prolific, well-known WordPress extension builders in Singapore. Okay, sure. We should try and get him to talk. Yeah. He was still in university when I'm not wrong. Second year, right? First or second year? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Big size. So anyway, and also it was that, at the meet-up, we also had the first engagement with a corporate as in the company, which was surprise, for me, it was a very surprise, surprising introduction. On the left, you see this person, his name is Chris Ismail. At the time, he was working at Microsoft as, Microsoft Singapore as part of the developer evangelist team. And he was a PHP programmer back in the Philippines. So he came to Singapore and he joined Microsoft. He was actually at the Facebook developer garage and he came up to me, hey, look, I really like what you're doing. I want to speak at your meet-ups and stuff. So he came and spoke at our second meet-up and on that day, he gave a demo on how Windows Server 2008 running headless and he installed WordPress through IIS and WordPress. And he did it in one sitting as in during the talk, at the beginning of the talk of his talk, he started installation at the end of the talk about half an hour later, he had a Windows Server 2008 running headless, IIS and WordPress running on it. My SQL, I believe. So it was pretty cool. We also had friends from Indonesia, another friend from Indonesia about the bottom right, his name is Ramayur Indra. He was basically part of the PHP user group in Indonesia and he also represent Zen technologies in this part of the world. I guess you all know what Zen technology is, right? Zen engine, Zen certified engineer, certification, stuff like that. So basically he represents them in this part of the world at the time. So he also came to Singapore and gave a talk there. On the left we also have another guy from Microsoft. His name is Matthew Hartman. So he and Chris Ishmael basically the attack team and gave a whole talk about how you could run PHP on the Windows platform. For me it was an interesting departure. I've been so familiar with open source technologies and suddenly we have a company that practices how we're writing proprietary software saying we want to embrace open source which for me was a very big departure from what I understand of these kind of companies. I guess for them it's a case of I rather have half a part of the pie rather than the whole pie as in I want to get more people involved into the Microsoft ecosystem and somehow. So it's kind of interesting. Yes we had women back then. We have women in PHP meetup which we have more right now which is cool. Anyway. But running two track meetups is hard because we have people who want to be in the other track and everything so it's like this is not going to work. So we revert back to a single track meetup and instead of having three speakers we just had two speakers. Basically we want cater to both the beginners and the professionals and for business folks we basically felt that they can take care of themselves because as long as you give them opportunities to network with people in the meetup they should be able to find people and talk to people and be able to basically potentially hire some of the people who are in a group. So we gave a lot of opportunities for networking like tea breaks and food and pizza like what we have right now in the beginning parts we have food so if you all can get to network and hopefully meet people and then of course then we have technical talks. In March of the year we organized a second Facebook developer garage because E27 wasn't going to run another one we kind of like say we want to help you with this. So we ran a second Facebook developer garage here in Microsoft at this place. We had two tracks and we had people we had panelists who basically were kind of like already building stuff on the Facebook platform. We said students from NUS who were running who were part of Ben Lyons class and they were doing they were basically writing Facebook games as part of their coursework. Some of you may recognize the lady on the left she's Suyuan she basically runs Momo Central yeah this is when 10 years ago when she was still undergrad in NUS you know the guy on the right in the middle she forgot his name but he's one of the co-founders of Nitrous IO yeah so it's kind of cool. Peter Kim Peter Kim yes correct Peter Kim he was also at Viki for a time anyway. Yup and yeah this is how big the group is. I also felt that being PHP developers we shouldn't just be looking at our own our own ecosystem we should also try to look outside to get exposed to how other people are doing things. So Brian my friends who are Rubyist and Pythonistas and we basically got them to talk a bit more about Ruby on Rails and Python, Django and how those frameworks do things so that we can get a better idea and yes there is that's our colleague I think his profile picture this is still his profile picture right? Alan? Also further on that year we had a meet up at Yahoo again Christian on the left this is the first time we actually we felt it was important to also get more PHP companies involved and basically at the time Yahoo was probably one of the most prominent or the other prominent company out there that uses PHP we also had a lot of students this is the first at this Yahoo at this meet up at Yahoo we actually had students coming from NUS High and their teacher basically brought them here to meet people in the industry you will notice the second guy on the left his name is Vishnu who is right now in NUS I think he is part of NUS Hackers all the members there so this is the first time I met him of course we also as part of it was important for me that the community can grow and for me one of the ways I thought we could figure this out was to have certification programs so I started a small little school to kind of like teach teach and run PHP certification courses we also had meet ups in other places at Oracle of course unfortunately that certification class didn't last very long it was about two years I think it ran for about one or two years but each of the course was about three or four weekends we did the last one probably in April and I took a small hiatus from then basically at the time I joined a startup like many people at the time they would rejoin the startup and startup life is hard it takes a lot of your time but in 2012 when I joined another startup a bigger startup and basically so I joined another startup in 2012 where I had a little bit more time so I started doing more meet ups again at the time when I first started doing meet ups I have three focus groups beginners, professionals and then business folks then I thought developers I shouldn't just clump you guys into beginners and professionals and what not we are all developers so I wanted to focus on how to make our ask better web developers because most PHP work is on building web applications so I thought we should focus more on web applications and web development how you can make you guys better web developers so we don't restrict ourselves just PHP but other areas like JavaScript web technologies and so on and so forth I also started doing some basic workshops back then and of course in 2014 we basically hosted one of the co-founders of automatic and also one of the creators of WordPress so a bunch of us Lester, is it you again? yeah so we had a lot of people again in this space this is the organizing team that was kind of like putting this whole thing together which is kind of to me was a very impressive thing because we only had very short time to do this I remember it was only about 1-2 weeks or very short time very short notice but we managed to pull it together we even did a podcast with Matt and Manuwek where we recorded we interviewed him and stuff which is kind of cool it was at the time in June which when we did this I kind of realized that look I knew that I have a team of people that I can count on and kind of like put to do some great things together in a sense it wasn't just about me doing this on my own anymore there's a group of people that I can count on and basically help me do stuff and I thought this is probably a good time to try and expand our capabilities and one of the ways I thought we could do this was to do a conference at first when I thought about doing a conference for PHP I was thinking maybe I just do one for Singapore I don't need to think too far then Lawrence Lawrence Putrao, my good friend he kind of poked me and said just do an Asia-wide one just go Asia don't just focus on Singapore just go Asia think big so in September we did the PHP conference in Asia how many of you guys were there? so this is a whole bunch of us the creator of PHP came now surprisingly I emailed him and he said yes I can do this so it was quite epic when he came now unfortunately he came to Singapore at a time where the haze was quite heavy so he took a lot of photos of hazy Singapore embarrassing but I'll come back again and we'll make sure we are clear skies right? Indonesia anyway so yeah it was the first time that we organized a conference like this and we had a lot of people coming from different parts of the world I even introduced them to some of the local cuisine and here's Rasmus again we also had students from IT basically we were very student friendly we want more people to come and join us and people join this, make IT a career so basically we want to encourage students to join us and I gave a whole bunch of free tickets out to ITE to Singapore Poly I think gave some tickets to them this year we do it again because we want to encourage as many of these young people to come forward and learn about the industry and what we do I also felt that at the time we needed to start some form of women's movement because it seems to be the coolest thing to do right now all the different user groups are doing like pie ladies PHP developers or female are strong people they're not ladies, they're women anyway this is the first photo we took quite a few of you right here thank you for coming this last year we did the conference a bit smaller there was a first year we tried to do like a tutorial day but I wasn't sure what we're doing so I kind of just did talks without any workshops and last year we actually did a one day workshop before the talks so that turned out to be very successful Amazon came in and sponsored the rooms three different rooms and they all fully packed they were like my god yes that was cool so we have speakers coming from all parts of the world the guy in the orange t-shirt his name is David Shafik people who knows about the Zen certification program would be familiar with him he basically wrote the textbook that we read to pass our exam it was kind of symbolic for me because when I passing the Zen certification exam was kind of like my entry point into kind of making this a serious career I really want to do this for real I really want to share be serious about the craft about this is what we're doing so when I read his book I was able to pass the exam because I read his book for me it was it was a very important moment for me when he came and I could tell him about what he has done for my life in my life so it's kind of like kind of cool same as the year before where Rasmus is in the audience and I kind of like hey because of you I have a career kind of cool anyway it was also that day that our president passed away so we also did kind of like a moment of silence for him anyway yeah more photos yay and because we had a lot of people coming from different parts of the world we also wanted to get in a mingle so I gave a little game where I got everyone taking photos together make sure you meet with somebody who is of a different continent from where you're from and take a photo with them this is kind of cool well of course we also had the PhD women who started then I think April was quite instrumental in putting that together so it's kind of cool so what's next probably we'll have another conference this year hopefully fingers crossed hopefully we'll have more meetups and more speakers come forward hopefully more co-organizers please help me now of course hopefully a new leadership to come forward and bring this to the next bring this to the next lab yeah I'm not going away soon so I'll still be here hopefully more people are coming forward what? I don't want to say it like that thank you anyway yeah that's all I have any questions? yeah so anyway thank you all for these 10 years I think it's really great that we have seen so many familiar faces coming from way back then and here is still with us and many new faces which I think I'm very thankful for and I think we hope we can continue to grow this community yeah so I have thank you oh I have a question yeah I asked a question how do you see PHP as relevant today versus 10 years ago when we first started I think as long as there's a web server running around they will probably be running PHP Perl is still running well yeah also that's also true Perl is still running so I guess as long as someone needs a website and probably and there will probably be people who can do it in WordPress and people can do it in other frameworks and probably can I think in many parts of Asia especially there's there are more PHP developers than other languages out there so I think it's still very good opportunities especially with the new releases of PHP PHP 7 and HHVM with PHP can basically is on par in terms of performance with a lot of other languages out there actually we outperform a lot of other languages in many aspects yeah I think it's the shortest route from getting from A to Z we want to get a website out write a few lines of code that are Ruby got a gem in store do this Python got a pip in store blah blah blah and it can't scale PHP can which is cool alright great so that's all I have thank you and next up Zion