After seeing what these guys have accomplished, met up with Maarten and Christian and got motivated to start PHP Zürich. This is running in parallel to the Swiss PHP user group, which tends to meet less frequently and roves around the country, at the cost of establishing regular faces. Amazingly, PHP Zurich has already got it’s first non-founding member – Rolf, who I met in London.
The first PHP Zurich meeting will be next month on Tuesday 14th at 18:30 – location – Bitflux HQ. I’ll be giving a short talk on PHP security, aimed more at beginners, then we’ll move on to Rossi’s. In future, the plan is to meet once a month on the first Tuesday – if you want to be notified automatically, see here.
Anyway – more info at http://zh.phpug.ch. If you feel like adding some details about yourself, see here. It’s open to anyone interested.
I’m curious — what do you guys do at those meetings? Here in Croatia we had some thoughts of organizing something of the sort, but each time we ended up a) bitching about employers, and b) getting drunk.
February 17th, 2006 at 10:24 am
c) goto a);)Actually the main Swiss PHP-UG is good at doing useful presentations, from my experiences.
Think the plan with PHP Zurich is to try to do something useful every time here before we head to here. “Useful” depends much on who turns up. If we get many PHP beginners, it may have to stay low end.
That said I’d be interested in heading the kind of direction Marcus does, at PHP London, with agile development etc. We’ll see.
Also think we’re going to have an interesting mix of people. Rolf, for example, shows up here as one of the authors. If we can keep that mix interesting, perhaps we start attracting headhunters in the way PHP London does – turn up and get a job offer ;)
February 17th, 2006 at 11:07 am
Generally speaking what language is spoken at these events in Switzerland then?
February 17th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
Good question- well mainly Swiss German. I’ll be annoying people by using a fair ammount of English (like the wiki) but no one has a problem with that here.
February 17th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
This gives me an incentive to have a holiday in Zurich!
Congratulations on starting something up like this, and long may it continue :)
//I’m the guy who had a chat about Google & ISPs at the Blogathon//
February 18th, 2006 at 8:14 am
Let’s see if I can make it… :)
February 19th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
good work,
we have a php user group here in my city (Alexandria) and there is more groups around the country (Egypt), the problem was about the place of the meetings and the way to organize a project so every one can share and learn with others.
so i have some questions and if you can give me links can help or any thing else i will be very thankful :)
1- how you prepare your speech?
2- if you decided to develope an open source application with the groupe , what will be your methdology to organize that?
thank you harry :)
February 20th, 2006 at 12:12 am
Alexandria sounds nice, Zurich too – I cannot be a regular attendee at either, but like many php’ers if I can fine-tune a trip – or (even better) formulate a holiday break with my wife around a php meetup then I might try it.. they might speak a bit of French in Zurich..
February 20th, 2006 at 8:47 am
There’s a ton of stuff on this but I have my own approach which is nothing more than some guidelines;
- Know what you’re talking about (really)
- Dump all your ideas in one place
- Try to think in terms of someone who doesn’t know the subject
- Create structure (throwing out stuff and clarifying) – this is a loop which you do as much as you have time for
- Talk to your audience (don’t be too reliant on slides – don’t repeat the text of your slides)
Pretty much all of this falls out of the first point – knowing what you’re talking about.
You mean ad-hoc group, formed from the user group? Can’t really comment here as I haven’t done this myself but what I imagine is:
- you need to be willing to give up your time and be a (benevolent) dictator.
- you need online developers tools on the kind they have at sourceforge.net
- you probably want to explore agile methodologies (e.g. extreme programming)
February 22nd, 2006 at 7:15 am
thanx, that was very helpful :)
i was reading 2 monthes ago about extreme programming and FDD , xp was very good and i think that we can use it.
February 22nd, 2006 at 5:02 pm
[...] So this event is still going (after renaming to webtuesday.ch—final site updates still on my list). Actually it’s been a surprise success—there’s now a regular core of attendees and some fascinating technical points of view and experience. [...]
May 17th, 2006 at 12:46 am