Give a talk at Bristol's PHP meetup
Speak at PHPSW
It's a really warm, friendly crowd. Loads of people gave their very first talk at PHPSW, and some of them now speak at conferences. If you've never spoken before, this is a good place to start.
To arrange a talk, email [email protected] with a title and a rough idea of what it's about.
What to talk about
Anything a room full of PHP developers would find interesting. It doesn't have to be about PHP: we've had talks on FPGAs and on making WW2 war diaries searchable. Some ideas:
- PHP itself: new features, the type system, internals, generics (almost).
- Frameworks and packages: Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, Drupal, or something you've open sourced.
- AI: coding assistants, agents, MCP, building features on LLMs, and what it all means for us.
- DevOps: Docker, CI/CD, cloud hosting, observability, scaling.
- Testing and code quality: TDD, static analysis, refactoring legacy code.
- APIs, architecture and databases: DDD, event sourcing, performance, MySQL and Postgres.
- Security: the OWASP Top 10, authentication, supply chain.
- The front end: JavaScript, Livewire, accessibility, design systems.
- Careers and teams: moving into management, freelancing, hiring, working remotely, giving talks.
- Things you've built: side projects, war stories, lessons learned the hard way.
How long?
- Lightning talk: ideally 10 to 15 minutes in total, including questions.
- Full talk: anything from 30 to 45 minutes, leaving a bit of time for questions.
How tight we are on timing depends on how the evening is put together, so ask us.
On the night
- People turn up from 6.30pm. Please get there for 6.30 too, so we can do a quick tech check before we start.
- There's pizza, so you won't go hungry.
- You'll be presenting on a big TV. We have HDMI and USB-C connectors.
- Bring your own laptop if you can. If you need us to bring one, let us know in advance.
- It's a compact group, so there's no microphone.
- We often record the talks, and the videos appear on our YouTube channel a few months afterwards. This is completely optional: if you don't want to be recorded, just let us know.
- Afterwards we usually go for a drink at a pub nearby. We'd love you to join us, and as you're speaking, the drinks are on us.
Where
All our venues are wheelchair accessible.
- Temple Studios, Lower Approach Road, Bristol BS1 6QA. Getting there, access and parking →
Driving? Bristol's traffic is horrific, but let us know in advance and we might be able to find you a parking space.