 If there's any. Oh, it's quite a number. Okay. Hi. What's that? So, that's right. So, about the Philippines. So, now we'll be just based in the Philippines, obviously. So, it's a little bit about our country. So, the people there are pretty social. We're pretty social since childhood. So, basically, from family gatherings to the school, we tend to hang around the same people, basically. And if you're interested in the same thing, usually you can find a friend in the Philippines. Because we're in the Philippines, it's an island nation. So, it's one difficulty to attend a meet-up from, let's say, south in Mindanao to Manila. So, in that sense, it kind of limits the audience that you can participate in your meet-up. Furthermore, there are different dialects in each region, which can also make it difficult. And it's not the whole country that speaks English. There are certain, like, who are really fluent in it. So, although that's the case, English is still an official language. Starting from grade school, everyone is taught the basics of grammar and how to speak in English. And that progresses into high school and eventually college. So, yeah. So, one question that came up at one of our meet-ups, you know, lean coffee meet-up, was why do we attend meet-ups? So, for me, Filipinos tend to go to the meet-ups for social aspect. And maybe the second part is to learn something new. So, but I observed that basically after each lecture, when someone's done talking in the Philippines, it's hard to get questions from the audience. It's like they're shy or something. Or my theory is that they think it's like a school where they just go to a lecture and then talk to the teacher, talks, and then, okay, you're done except that there's no homework. So, in our meet-ups, we usually have beginner-level topics. The reason for this is there are a lot of students who are still studying Laravel. So, we like to cater to the majority of the audience. So, we make most of the topics about beginners or beginners can understand. Then, we usually inject something like advanced lesson or something or something advanced topic that other professionals might be interested to go to the talk. And, yeah, so that's what makes the meet-up more interesting. In the Philippines, there's a funny story, though. You commonly get questions like, is there a certificate at the end of the meet-up? Or even if they ask even if it's free? I think it's because there's a big culture there where you're supposed to attend seminars and all. But, yeah, it's just a funny story. So, aside from Laravel Philippines, I attend other meet-ups. So, that's how I kind of try to improve the Laravel Philippines meet-ups. So, these are the other meet-ups that I go to. Usually, if there's something interesting, I just go to it. For example, data science is a big thing in the Philippines right now because there's the R-users group where I try to study scripting in R. Manila JavaScript is pretty popular as well. As you can see, there are other meet-up groups, not only technical. So, yeah, those are, like, very diverse in terms of meet-ups. Okay. So, I go to these meet-ups as well to reach out to the crowd. Basically, try to gauge what new topics are there that maybe I could add it to one of the topics in Laravel Philippines. So, let's go to Laravel usage in the Philippines. I don't have the exact numbers, but based on the meet-up group, I can tell by the industry that a lot of startups are using Laravel, especially if the technical co-founder is a HP guy. They usually recommend Laravel just to begin the project. A lot of the other startups that I know of, they use their own framework, they create their own, or they use coding nitrogen. There's one startup that used symphony before, but then they eventually moved on to RubioMails. So, yeah, it's a pretty diverse group. Actually, I tried to make the Laravel Philippines group more diverse by introducing different topics. Like, last time we had GUCLI instead of the usual Laravel back-end stuff about PHP. So, this is our Facebook group. So, in the picture, that was one of our beat-ups where we discussed TDD using pure PHP. So, we've been handling meet-ups since 2013. We host many meet-ups, many companies approach us, and they basically want to promote their devs as well as their company. So, they host the meet-up for us, and then we go there and they present the night. So, basically, it's a pretty regular kind of group. So, we have different kinds of topics. We have lightning talks as well. We sometimes talk about people's projects. One time, I just played a video from LaraCast, and the newbies enjoyed that one. So, we learned a lot from these meet-ups. So, this is our group on meetup.com. That was an old banner I created a long time ago. So, that was the TDD workshop that we had. So, it was about a calculator test. So, you just create a calculator, and we created unit tests for each of the functions. So, our Laravel group here has about 1,700 plus members right now. So, this is one of the first meet-ups that I had. It was very small in, held in Microsoft Philippines about 2014. So, it was the fun meet-up where we basically had, you know, just getting to know each other and talking about each other's projects. So, I introduced something new in the Laravel Philippines meet-up. It's called Lean Coffee Style. So, it's similar to the UX group, and I'm sure you've encountered it as well. So, basically, you have this Kanban board where you write things to discuss and things to be discussed, and people can prioritize which topics they want to talk about. So, the main takeaway that I get from these kinds of meet-ups is a lot of newbies learn more about the business side rather than the technical side. And if they have, like, questions about technical, they quickly get the answer much faster than if they were to post it online. So, basically, we've been doing this for a while. We had at least two coffee meet-ups. And this is one of the meet-ups where we had some topics there. So, some topics can range, like, as you can see, one of the notes says, pet projects, other languages, like node or Python. There's even, you know, some meta kind of question, why attend meet-ups. So, yeah. And there are some advanced ones, like APIs and microservices. So, in the Larva community, I tried to get the members to contribute to open source. One of the tips that I learned from getting people to contribute is to create a contributing file, basically. So, you're supposed to basically set the parameters for how they will contribute, like, do they file an issue queue, and then when they file a pull request to reference the issue queue. Things like that. That really helps the newbies understand. And for the people who are maintaining the project, know what exactly, you know, at least there's a process and it becomes clear what they want to do. And, yeah, it's easier for the newbies to contribute. So, yeah, that's basically that. One of our members, Jeff DeSena, they created this project called Larvaecom, which is basically Larvaecomers. So, he made it so that it's test-driven development kind of driven contribution model. So, he won't accept any pull request unless there's a test to it. And it helps the newbies understand or be forced to learn about test-driven design and development. So, yeah. So, another thing, another tip that I learned is to create a community guidelines. So, in one of our repos, I placed this. So, basically, how will you communicate to other members, like with respect and what are the responsibilities of someone sharing something to the group. So, you know, basically it tells you to post it to something like GIST or other text sharing kind of code. Okay. So, shared value, these things help make the community more cohesive, coherent in their values so that you don't have a lot of problems later on. Like, for one time, there was a guy in Facebook group where it was kind of rude to the newbies and, yeah, basically had to kick him out for a bit. And, yeah, it was the fun part of being community. So, why I think the community will continue to grow, I think it's because of the Larvaeco ecosystem. There's a laracast.com. You can learn Larvaecom from that. There's FORGE, which allows you to learn how to deploy their Larvae apps by just paying $10 or something. And there's a forums, larvae.io. So, that's a good reason why Larvaeco continues to grow is that there's all these things that help Larvae developers become better. So, some lessons learned from running a meetup. So, I learned that there's lots of room for improvement. So, basically, it's a lot of hard work and discipline. Like, you really need to practice a lot in speaking and sending requests to the venue partners and how to negotiate for that. So, it's a lot, my learning is that it's a lot like learning, like running a startup. So, in a startup, you have to run everything by yourself, then eventually people join you. And you make sure that they're of the same value. They have the shared values that you have of culture. And this helps eliminate problems about commitments and basically hiring the wrong people who eventually leave you. Another thing I learned is that you have to build an online portal. This on the way, it's kind of hard because I'm also handling a day job. So, you have to find a way for people to contribute where they can blog, they can share their issues and find jobs. So, that helps build the ecosystem. Okay. So, that's another good thing because it will, like, because the Philippines is an island nation, there's a lot of people all around who can't go to the place where there's a meetup. And the plan is from this, maybe we could go global. I learned about this last night. Basically, thanks to Thomas. So, there's this website called PHP.usergroup. So, you could look up usergroups there. There's also friends of PHP.org. And there's a lot of awesome this out there that you could look up the different kind of meetups that are there that I could add my group to. So, I just like to share some tips in growing an FB group before I end. So, we have an FB group in Facebook, basically. And I learned that you could post questions to engage your conversations with your members. So, you could maybe post about, ask you about their favorite editor. This, the next topic, tabs or spaces is a big kind of hot topic that I like to ask sometimes. So, some people, they use it like a Stack Overflow. So, this is one of the posts. So, he's sharing about some tip about clean code. So, they're using this thing called, basically, carbon that, now that SH, which is a way to beautify your code snippets when you're sharing them online. So, it transforms it to an image, basically. So, yeah, that's one of the things. So, yeah, thanks. I'm Joe Palala. I head the Larval Philippines. And I also contribute to I volunteer Philippines. Do tweet me up if you want to talk to me. Thank you.