Mayflower and Symfony2

Two weeks ago, I had the chance to attend Symfony Live 2012 in Berlin. At first, I tried to get a ticket by submitting several proposals for talks. This didn’t work out but the organizers were very kind and invited me to attend the conference for free!

A couple of days later, I read about the Symfony2 Framework Certification. I had passed some certifications before (namely Zend Certified Engineer PHP5.3, Oracle Certified Professional (OCP), MySQL 5 Developer, and Scrum Product Owner Certification) and thought this might be a good chance to deepen my Symfony2 knowledge. Mayflower’s reaction to my wish was very positive. In they end, Mayflower covered the certification fee and gave me the chance to be the company’s first Symfony2 Certified Developer.

To prepare myself for the test, I had a look at the publicly available list of covered topics and started reading a lot about them. In the end, I had 50 pages of notes while working through this long list. It turned out to be a good preparation. Nevertheless, the exam was challenging and I had to guess some answers. One personal highlight was that I was able to complete the whole test in 30 minutes, which is one third of the available time.

Three days after the exam, I received an email which said that I had passed the certification.

Mayflower and Symfony2

After completing my bachelor studies at TU München, I started working at Mayflower in autumn 2010. At this time, everybody was using Zend Framework 1. During my studies, I had earned some money by freelancing. I used Symfony 1.2 – 1.4 and Zend Framework 1 for creating many small webpages for local companies and organizations. When I first heard about Symfony2, I got really excited, started reading about it, and started to use it for private projects.

As soon as Symfony2 released its first beta version, Mayflower started having great interest in the new framework, too. They asked me whether I was interested in designing a cheat sheet about Symfony2. We started the project „Symfony2 Poster“ in January 2012 and released the poster in April. The content was provided by multiple developers of Liip AG and me. If you didn’t order the poster yet, do so now!

In the meantime, Mayflower had started using Symfony2 for new projects successfully. Today, I am proud to say that Mayflower has completely added Symfony2 to their standard tech set. We are using it for most of our new projects and contributing to the (great) Symfony2 community has become an activity supported by the company. In the future, more Mayflower developers will get the chance to prove their Symfony2 knowledge by doing the certification and hopefully some of them will decide to actively contribute to the project and its ecosystem, as well.