The interesting people you meet at user group meetings, all the stuff you learn at conferences and the freely available open source projects that are out there. Those are just three of many things that make the PHP community into something awesome. However, every once in a while I hear some plea for the great PHP community that makes me a bit nauseous. “Sharing code, knowledge, elePHPants, it’s all so fun to share and be part of this great club of lovely people! I share my project with you and you share your project with me. And then we hug! Weeeee!!!”

Photo by Nelson Piedra

Well f*ck that. Of course, whenever you regularly meet a group of people you will make some new friends, especially when you share a common interest. You might enjoy drinking beers with them or do some coding on their projects, because you think it’s a great project and you want to help them out. However, you will also make friends when you go out to the pub. Hell, you will probably even make friends at the weekly meeting for people with ingrown toenails – which is great, sure! But saying ingrown toenails are a great thing because “you meet such great people” just seems a bit awkward to me.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the sharing, partying and beer drinking as well, and I wouldn’t want to miss it. The most interesting people you meet on conferences are the people you meet on the social events afterwards, but it’s all a consequence, not a cause. Saying you are part of the community because of it, is like saying to your date that you went through the whole process of “having sex and all” because you like smoking the cigarette at the end so much.

So besides the hippy arguments, the PHP community also has some great, more down-to-earth things to offer for companies, developers and everybody else involved. Below I just listed a couple of arguments I could come up with by brainstorming for ten minutes. I’m pretty sure I might have missed one or two, but it should at least give you an idea.

Contributing to open source projects
On first sight, contributing to open source projects might look like charity. You and your noble steed have come to save the day, and with all your goodness you fix a bug in the project. Hooray! But contributing has some other upsides as well. First of all, it gives you a bit more renown and might make your resume look more interesting. How great would it be if you could put “regular contributor to the Zend Framework project” on there? By contributing you would probably learn a lot as well, just by looking into other people’s code and writing documentation or tests for it.

Or if you’re using an open source product but you need to fix or extend it for your own purpose, giving back the changes you made means you can now keep updating to newer versions of the product. Your changes will be in it, so you won’t be stuck with the same version for the rest of your life because you added some custom hacks and an update would overwrite those changes.

Open sourcing your own projects
This one is rather simple; open sourcing your own project means that – if you do it right – people will start contributing to it. When your company has developed a somewhat useful tool, open sourcing it will probably mean that other people will start using the tool as well. Eventually, some people might come and fix some bugs in it, improve the tool and build some new features for it. Your tool gets enhanced, extended, better – for free!

Conferences and user group meetings

Events like conferences are a great place to learn and to get inspired, but can also be used for recruitment and networking. People might learn from the talks, or from talking to each other. Talks can also be inspirational and work as a trigger for somebody to start investigating a technique or a tool he didn’t think of before.

If you do it right, speaking at such events will give you and the company you’re representing some great renown. Tens, maybe hundreds of potential colleagues, clients and people who might hire you see that you, and the company you’re representing, really know what it’s all about. As a company it’s a great way to show that you take software development seriously, and that your office is a great place to work. The speaker gets a bit more fame, and can add another interesting line on his resume.

I did a little research on this subject by starting a poll about a week ago. The results were somewhat surprising, and they are probably hopelessly unreliable because of the group that answered the poll Still, it gives you a bit of an idea:

67% goes there to talk to interesting people

58% goes there for the talks (which I had expected to be more, since that’s the main thing conferences have to offer – the stuff they’re selling)

53% goes there for the hugging and beer drinking

25% goes there to speak (you might see now what I meant by hopelessly unreliable )

24% goes there to promote themselves

16% goes there to promote their company, brand or product

8% goes there to recruit new developers

19% selected “other”. Answers included “I go there to convert all over to ruby” and one voter goes to PHP conferences to “be away from the missus”

The community online
Whether it’s on IRC or on some forum, there are some great resources out there for getting and sharing information, pretty much for the same reasons as the speaking and attending talks part: the person answering a question get a bit more renown, the person asking the question has his problem solved and can continue. Also, answering questions often forces you to do a little research yourself, how did this work again exactly? Somebody else might give an alternative answer to the question that would work just as well, but you hadn’t thought about that solution yet. You can really learn a lot from answering other people’s questions!

The hippy thing
And then of course, there’s the hippy thing. A great network of people that help each other out, give each other advice, do an open source project together and then drink some beer. This post is to show that it’s not the only thing that matters – but of course it is an important reason why it’s a lot of fun to be a part of the PHP community.