Happy birthday PHP UG DO!

Today the PHP Usergroup Dortmund turns 2 years and I want to congratulate with this small post!

We are looking back on 2 years of professional information exchange on PHP and other geek topics, as well as on lots and lots of great fun. The past year was especially moving for us. The usergroup constantly grew and we now have a group of 5 people (Tobi, Kore, Jakob, Peter, Manuel) meeting on a weekly basis and a fluctuating group of about 20 poeple who turn up irregularly from time to time. And with those guys we organized a lot of great events in the last year, beside our regular meetings which mostly consist of having some beer, hacking and chatting:

On March 9th 2006 we celebrated into the 1st birthday of the usergroup. A week later, we decided to make our own little PHP sub conference on the FrOSCon, the Free and OpenSource Conference in Bonn. On the same day, we announced the first talk for this year in our usergroup, where I talked about eZ Components and infected a lot of the groupies with an addiction to them. By the end of may, we finished our call for papers for the PHP room at the FrOSCon and started deciding on our agenda, which turned out with a lot of interessting talks in mid June. At the end of this month the first FrOSCon conference took place and the PHP room as well as the 3 talks Kore and me gave, were a great success. As a result from this, we started planning the "PHP introduction workshop" during July, which should be held at the local university. After the summer whole, during September, we finished planning this idea finally, which turned out to become a small 2 day conference with 2 sessions tracks: The PHP Weekender was born. We especially enjoyed this event and it was a huge success. In November we (somewhat unintended) celebrated Helloween and nominated Kore to be the "Hacking witch". Over the year border between 2006 and 2007 we had another series of talks, where up to 20 people turned up in the office of eZ Systems to meet with us.

Now that we turn 2, we have another series of talks upcoming. As Kore already announced, Jan Lenhardt will give 2 talks: One on "HTTP(S) load balancing and high availability with Wackamole", which will take place next Thursday, and on on "CouchDB - An alternative to MySQL" on the Thursday after that.

So, my fellow PHP usergroupies, I'm looking forward to another year of great fun with you all! :)