PHP Québec organised its monthly meetup, September 1st 2016 in Centre cloud.ca, Montréal.

http://www.phpquebec.org/

Back in April 2016, while in Mauritius, I was already planning my trip to Montréal. It was obvious for me that I should find an IT community out there to share with! As I was in an intense work period, I decided to reach Eric Hogue, organising PHP Québec Community, to ask if there were interest in any of my existing PHP talks I was to deliver at Mauritius Developers Conference.

He was very welcoming, and confident that a PHP introduction or a refactoring session could grab new people in their monthly meetup, happening every first thursday, early evening just after work. And so we did!

First, the venue offered by Centre cloud.ca was great: just downtown Montréal, easy to reach and park, nice wide room with plenty of space and some oldy games arcade (I loved it!).

Program is deadly efficient for these meetups: while leaving your office, you just get in to be welcomed by awesome geeks, provided with fresh beers and hot pizzas sponsored by Pronexia! Sharing ideas and questions is quite natural then.

I really liked to see youngster primers, mouthful of questions, sharing ideas and projects with highly qualified PHP mentors like Eric, who is always ready to help: pretty good vibes in there!

It was great to showcase how to go from a legacy PHP codebase to an efficient architecture application, using Composer and autoloading to leverage existing libraries such as PHP Markdown by Michel Fortin, who himself happens to be from… Lévis in Québec, Canadian too!

We ended Q/A sharing with (beers and) an interesting discussion regarding why every single developer with a project to build should consider using a framework, and how the learning curve could be different for each of us: one wanting to build its own custom framework from scratch to deeply understand concepts running background, another needing quick and concrete results that a world class framework like Laravel or Zend Framework could provide before digging in slowly.