About
Meetups are a great opportunity to get in touch with other companies or people that use CakePHP.
It is a good place to share experiences and find people even that might have similar interests or who could even join your projects.
The CakeFest is only one a year, and usually not around the corner from you, meetups can be a regional thing in your city or nearby.
CakePHP Meetups Germany
We just had a new meetup this month, and it was quite a crowd, 20+ people attended.
CakePHP devs not only from Berlin attended, but due to the IPC conference nearby also some developers from further away joined in.
The talks where mainly about how companies use CakePHP, and what experiences they made so far.
My talk was mainly about how to upgrade as smoothly as possible to CakePHP 3.x.
The slides can be found here: german-cakephp-meetup-3-berlin.
Someone posted on twitter about it: dopitz/status/608683826932543488.
Good thing I didn’t wear my worn-out shirt 😛
Oh, and there is a group pic (some left already again, though): HeikkiPals/status/610475391015383041.
Findings so far
It turned out to be quite successful here in Berlin if held only once every 3-4 months. Too regularly and people miss out.
It also helped if some interesting topics/talks were provided and communicated before-hand. An extra bonus would be a prominent speaker, but
that is not always that easy to organize.
Overall, 20+ people is a good standard already and hopefully more and more devs also join us in real life in the future.
Other meetups world-wide
Check out the awesome-cakephp list regarding meetups in USA (NY), NL, FR, …
Other frameworks can do it, why shouldn’t we? 🙂
Join in
If you are from Germany (doesn’t have to be Berlin) and you want to either attend an existing meetup event or create/host your own one, see meetup.com/de/CakePHP-DE/
Send your ideas for a 20-30 min talk, propose some discussion topics and be part of the CakePHP community!