.EU PHP company knowledge exchange
For now I am limiting this vision to just European companies. But the idea that is materializing is for PHP companies to train each other on technology or processes related to their daily business. Liip today received a remote training by Konstantin from KnpLabs on Behat. In January David will give a training for KnpLabs on behalf of Liip about the Symfony2 CMF. For now this will happen remote (we still need to figure out a better setup), because this all happened fairly short notice after talking about it this for many months. Ideally actually I think it should be done on site, to further expand the knowledge sharing. It would also be a bit of a perk for people inside a company that show leadership in a technology to have the opportunity to visit another company. Actually I want to also explore letting junior developers that have lets say 2-3 years of experience under their belt to temporarily switch their work place with another equally experienced developer at a different company for say 3-6 months. If your company would be interested in joining this please let me know.
I am not sure how to best coordinate this just yet. As mentioned from a technical perspective using Google Hangout like we did today isn't ideal. From personal experience Skype is also not great. At Liip we have a fancy Tannenberg Video conf setup, but of course not everyone has one of these standing around. But if we do these presentations in person that issue is solved. I am also not sure if there are legal aspects that should be considered if we start growing this. Of course there could also be business related obstacles to overcome since at least some of us compete with each other in the same market. But none of that should stop us! I think this could really be the start of something exciting for PHP companies.