PHP South West UK

PHP South West UK

2013 – 2015See live
Steve on X

I ran PHP South West UK, the PHP user group in Bristol, from 2013 to 2015. When I took it on it had met three times that year, a handful of people giving talks in a pub. I got it back to a talk night every month, and within two years it was one of the best attended PHP user groups in the country.

PHP South West UK

Running the group

Every month needed speakers, a venue, and food and drink. Local companies hosted us, BaseKit, Brightpearl, MixRadio and JUST EAT among them, and sponsors paid for the pizza and beer. Most nights had a theme, such as scaling, databases, testing or security, with lightning talks a couple of times a year and the PHPub quiz at Christmas.

In 2014 and 2015 we put on 24 nights, with 69 talks from 44 speakers, from people giving their first talk to names from across the PHP world, such as Derick Rethans, Phil Sturgeon, Rob Allen, Marco Pivetta and Jordi Boggiano. Nights went from around a dozen people to an average of 44 in 2015, with up to 64 in the room.

The website

I built the group's website in Silex, over 500 commits between 2014 and 2016. Console commands synced Meetup, Twitter, Joind.in and YouTube into Redis on every deploy, giving the group:

  • Events, talks and speakers, with slides in the browser and recordings of the talks

  • Members, sponsors, photos and reviews from Meetup, and Joind.in feedback on talks

  • A contact form, a code of conduct and a brand page

  • Sponsor invoices and vouchers

It ran on two app servers behind Varnish and HAProxy, provisioned with Ansible, with Redis on ElastiCache and Thumbor for images, until I moved it to Heroku in 2016.

github.com/phpsw/phpsw

PHPSW today

The group is still going, run by Ben Lumley, Dave Liddament and Chris Blunden, with a new website at phpsw.uk.

The classic site I built is still up at phpsw.steve.ly, with the group's events since pulled in from Meetup. Do check out the animated SVG balloon elephants that I am still very proud of.

Screenshots