A decade of PHP!

Happy Birthday, PHP! And thanks a lot for the fish, Rasmus! Without you and all the others from the PHP community PHP wouldn’t be such a successful project.

My brief history about getting in touch with PHP:

• back in 1998, playing with PHP3 and subscribing to the German speaking mailing list hosted and administrated by Ralf Geschke
• 1999: creating PHP-Center.de, the first German speaking portal about PHP, together with Ralf Geschke
• 1999: being responsible for the technical part of the relaunch of würzburgOnline, a city portal
• 2000: co-organising the first PHP Conference „PHP Kongress“, together with Ralf Geschke and Globalpark
• 2000: doing several professional PHP trainings for companies like Lycos Europe and others
• 2001: the advent of the International PHP Conference, organised by Software&Support, me being the Chair of the Advisory Board and up to today responsible for the whole content of the Conference
• 2001: the advent of the German speaking print magazine „PHP Magazin“, me being editor in chief up to today
• 2001: co-founding ThinkPHP
• 2001: remembering back the strong UserGroup community in Germany, the meetings on the InternetWorld fair (chinese ducks *mjam*) …
• … and several other things like professional PHP support, PHP online trainings, PHP inhouse trainings, premium software development and such
• During the years, seeing more and more big companies (i.e. our customers like CapGemini, E.ON and such) using PHP without fear
• 2005: the PHP5 poster :-)
• trying to get PHP in touch with environments no-one would ever imagine (PHP as an online transaction middleware outperforming a Java solution, PHP as the backend of a whole bunch of XUL-based applications with a Cobol connector etc.)

It’s a fascinating community with a lot of ideas, friendly people and having a lot of fun on Conferences and fairs. Hope to see them soon on LinuxTag.