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The PHP conference season is reaching its climax with the many events taking place in autumn.

I personally love conferences, it’s the perfect mixture of geekiness, knowledge sharing, networking and socializing. Everyone has his reasons for attending.

The 2010 events

The 2010 conference season has been very satisfactory so far:

• Organizing the very first PHPBenelux conference in January
• Attending the PHP UK conference in February
• Speaking at the Dutch PHP Conference in June

And as you all know, there’s plenty still to come:

• PHP Northwest Conference in Manchester (October)
• The International PHP Conference in Mainz (October)
• PHP Barcelona Conference (October)
• Zendcon in Santa Clara (CA) (November)

The call for papers for these conferences have closed and the executive committees are now working on their schedule. There are some early speaker announcements for the majority of these events, but there’s plenty of talks to be released in the upcoming days/weeks.

PHPBenelux is representing big time!

I’ve noticed that Michelangelo van Dam, my friend and co-boardmember at PHPBenelux, has already been selected for a couple of nice ones. It’s good to see that Belgium is well represented abroad.

I had the luck to represent at DPC and Felix De Vliegher, another good friend and co-boardmember at PHPBenelux had a couple of good runs in Italy, Canada and Berlin. Other Belgian PHPBenelux boardmembers like Paul Borgermans and Patrick Allaert have done their fair share of talks as well.

And let’s not forget our Dutch boardmembers: Stefan Koopmanschap has always been a regular fixture and still represents PHPBenelux quite often. And of course there’s Martin de Keijzer, our newest boardmember who managed to impress the audience during his fabulous uncon talk about Continuous Integration at DPC.

Speaking of conferences, our very own PHPBenelux Conference has extended its Call For Proposals up to September 1st. If you want talk about something cool, please sign up here.

Why should you attend?

If you’re into PHP and have never felt the urge to go to a conference, please pause for a moment and think about the following benefits:

• You’ll learn from the best: PHP conferences usually attract the best PHP developers and PHP contributors. You’ll learn from people who have either a great amount of experience or from people who actually invented the technology.
• You’ll learn about brand new things: PHP is not just about making dynamic websites. PHP has grown and is now a mature, enterprise grade language. You’ll learn about the latest evolutions in PHP technology
• You’ll get to know a lot of cool people: conferences are social events too. You’ll get to know cool and friendly people who you can hang out with between sessions and during the evening social events.
• You’ll have a great excuse to go abroad: YES ! Let’s not forget you’ll have the opportunity to travel abroad while you’re officially working. If you’re self-employed it’s a different story, but you can still put the costs in your taxes.
• You’ll be able to become one of those speakers yourself: after a while, you’ll get to know some people, you’ll be a regular at some events and eventually you’ll have the guts to submit for a CfP. The first couple of times, you might not get selected, but if you continue to invest in your community reputation, it’s just a matter of time before you talk gets selected.