Croeso PHP South Wales!

Last night was the first meetup of Cardiff's PHP South Wales user group! It was a great first event, and it was great to meet a lot of new people as well as catch up some familiars within the 36 (according to meetup.com) attendees - including some PHP South West regulars.

Organised by Steve and Amy McDougall, it was held in Barclays' Eagle Lab which was a great space, and it was cool to be back in Brunel House having worked in that building previously whilst at Appnovation.

Pretty cool being back in the centre of Cardiff. pic.twitter.com/kh7Oi2tPDD

— Oliver Davies (@opdavies) July 31, 2018

Speakers

Rob Allen was the main speaker, who gave an interesting talk and a brave live demo on serverless PHP and OpenWhisk. I always enjoy watching Rob speak, which I've done a number of times at different events, and it was great to be able to chat for a while after the meetup too.

Great to see ⁦@akrabat⁩ speaking about serverless PHP at the first ⁦@phpSouthWales⁩ meetup. #php #phpc #cardiff pic.twitter.com/Q9YaQ6O1fB

— Oliver Davies (@opdavies) July 31, 2018

We also had a couple of lightning talks, starting with Ismael Velasco giving an introduction to progressive web applications (PWAs). I can see some potential uses for this on my current work project, and I look forward to seeing the full talk soon).

I gave an updated version of my Tailwind CSS lightning talk, and enjoyed being able to show some examples of new sites using Tailwind such as Laravel Nova, Spatie's new website and PHP South Wales itself!

Lightning talk time, first @IsmaelVelasco talking about #PWA 😎🎉 pic.twitter.com/KrJGZlIp7V

— PHP South Wales (@phpSouthWales) July 31, 2018

Conclusion

It's great to have a meetup in Cardiff again, and having thought about organising something myself previously, I'm glad to see someone step forward to do so. This shows that there's still a strong PHP community in Cardiff and South Wales, and hopefully this will be the first meetup of many. I'll look forward to seeing the local community grow!

Thanks again to Steve and Amy for organising, Eagle Labs for hosting, the sponsors, and Rob and Ismael for speaking.

It would be great to see even more people at the next one. If you're interested, take a look at the group's website, meetup.com group and Twitter profile. Alternatively, get in touch with myself or one of the organisers for more information.

Croeso ac iechyd da PHP South Wales!