Published: March 14th, 2017

Speaker feedback is crucial thing for our meetups to be better: it gives valuable info to speakers and organizers. What attendees liked or not, what was clear and conscise and most important: suggestions on some missing details or explanation will make speakers better. As organizers, without it we dont know what are the interests of our members, if they would like to hear more on the subject or should we not push in that direction.

We have been looking for ways to improve feedback rates on our meetup talks, from mentioning it all the time to personally contacting and asking members to leave some. We found ourselves at the point we stoped publishing Joind.in events cause whats the point when no feedback is left?

Together with help of our dear sponsors, we decided to organize raffles on each meetup for next 6 months, giving members who left feedback on joind.in possibility to win some of our sponosor gifts.

How can I participate in raffles?

After meetup, go to joind.in, find the talks you listened to and leave feedback. Usually it takes 2-3 minutes to add your feedback to a talk, so it's really not that big of an effort. Every meetup, from a big hat, we will be pulling out names of members that left feedback on last 3 meetups. If you left feedback on more than 1 talk, your name will be in hat for each of the comments you left, increasing your chances to win.

If your name is pulled out, you can pick from one of the gifts we are giving away. Unfortunately, if we pull you and you are not there, we will go for the next name.

What are the prizes?

We are starting with 3 sponsors now:

Jetbrains, company behind PHPStorm is giving away 1-year licences of PHPStorm, each worth €199.

SHIFT Developer Conference 2017, was kind enought to give us tickets for their conference, each worth $150.

CodeAnywhere, collaborative tool for developers to use cloud as their IDE setup is giving away 1 year Freelancer plan, worth $84.

More sponsors coming soon

We will be adding more sponsors soon. If your company is interested in supporting feedback initiative, feel free to contact us by email info [at] zgphp (dot) org or one of our meetups. If you dont have your own products to give away, we have some ideas like books too ;)

Published: September 8th, 2015

No tears please! End summer break, cue new ZgPHP season! Join us at Mama, Preradoviceva 18 on Sep 17th and hear all about it.

Goran Juric will talk about Haproxy - TCP/HTTP load balancer. Learn what that exactly means and how you can leverage it to increase your web sites availability or distribute the load between multiple servers.

Published: June 2nd, 2015

That is right kids, school is over, summer break has begun. Celebrate it by attending a special season ending edition of ZgPHP meetup. Join us at Mama, Preradoviceva 18 on June 18th and hear all about it.

Ivan Habunek - Generators

Not just for electricity, right?

Generators are a cool, relatively new addition to PHP, we all know that. However, real world usage seems to still be pretty low. Many PHP devs are happy just using arrays, like they have done since the olden days.

This talk will quickly explain how generators work (spoiler: it's very simple) and then cover several real-world use cases.

A live coding session may or may not happen.

Ignite session

In Ignite talks, each speakers gets five (5) minutes, and must use twenty (20) slides that are automatically advancing after 15 seconds. So you are forced to get to the point. Pick any topic you like or if you lack inspiration choose something from Awesome PHP list.

Published: June 1st, 2015

Sorry this took soooo long. Video upload is hard, yo!

Announcements

Few quick infos and announcements were shared at the beginning of our meetup.

We relaunched our monthly newsletter. Subscribe and stay in the loop on what is going on in our user group.

Two conferences worth visiting are being organised in Croatia: PHP Summer camp and WebCamp Zagreb.

Netgen, our dear friends and active supporters are again throwing a tutorial based conferences dedicated to PHP & Symfony and eZ Publish. You can expect three days of workshops and one very cool excursion.

Our very own WebCamp Zagreb 2015 conference is looking for speakers and interesting topics. If you want to be a part of WebCamp as an attendee, grab an early bird ticket at 300 kn or speak at your local user group and get a ticket for free!

Talks

Miro Svrtan told us how he is Abusing Behat and Steve Tauber showed us how to build a REST JSON API.

Next meetup

We are busy preparing our next meetup - same place, same time: Mama, Preradovićeva 18 from 5:30pm. RSVP if you want to come.

Published: May 7th, 2015

OMG!!!eleven is it time for another meetup? Woot, woot! As usual, packed with much awesome, very talks! Come to Mama, Preradoviceva 18 on May 21st and hear all about it.

Miro Svrtan - Behat

While Behat is meant for behavior driven design, a lot of developers started using it as a tool for integration and regression testing. In a format understandable not only to developers you can easily test behaviour of your existing application (any web app, doesn't have to be written in PHP) utilising different scrapers/crawlers/browsers.

Tired of clicking around your browser to create selenium tests? Your application is heavily dependent on javascript? Behat (with help of Mink) can utilize Selenium and headless browsers like Firefox or Chrome to verify everything still works as expected.

With it's simple domain language, writing down and understanding existing tests is an easy task, not only for your frontend and backend developers, but QA too.

Miro Svrtan will take center stage and abuse us for half an hour.

Steve Tauber - Building a REST JSON API the right way

After the break Steve Tauber will talk about building a REST JSON API the right way. This is first part of his talk dedicated to this subject so we will focus on RESTful design techniques, the verbs, the nouns and logic in MVC environments.

Join us! RSVP here so that we can reserve you a seat!

Published: April 23rd, 2015

We got awesome feedback from one parent that dropped their youngest developer last Thursday.

"ZgPHP user group is nice. Kids behaved. Miro did not bite anyone for not speaking English. We might do it again next month."

Announcements

As usual, few quick infos and announcements.

We relaunched our monthly newsletter. Subscribe and stay in the loop on what is going on in our user group.

If you feel like chatting with other developers, drop by our Slack channel.

GrUSP is organising their annual PhpDay 2015 conference in Verona. Speakers and topics are published and tickets are still available! If you are interested in attending let us know as they were kind enough to give our user group a discount.

PHP Serbia is once again organising themed conference - SOLIDay. It is so good that they already sold all tickets. If you are going, let people know and maybe pick up someone that does not have transport.

No words need to be spent on Netgen, our dear friends and active supporters. They are again throwing a tutorial based conferences dedicated to PHP & Symfony and eZ Publish. You can expect three days of workshops and one very cool excursion.

Our very own WebCamp Zagreb 2015 conference is looking for speakers and interesting topics. If you want to be a part of WebCamp as an attendee, grab an early bird ticket at 300 kn or speak at your local user group and get a ticket for free!

Talks

Fatos Hoti told us all about Yii2 and Silvio Marijic introduced us to ZeroMQ.

Next meetup

We are busy preparing our next meetup - same place, same time: Mama, Preradovićeva 18 from 5:30pm. RSVP if you want to come.

Published: April 6th, 2015

Another month, another meetup? Wrong! This one is packed with so much awesome that we can't wait until April 16th to come to Mama, Preradoviceva 18.

Since Yii2 was released at the end of 2014 there was plenty of time for Fatos Hoti to get to know its dirty little secrets. Together, we will investigate what is new, what is better, what is worse and ž how to use it all in the real world.

Fatos is developer for over 10 years now, currently employed at Degordian. He loves code and everything about it.

Have you heard of ZeroMQ? Do you know what are Request-Reply, Publish-Subscribe or Pipeline patterns? How routing and transport works? Silvio Marijić, developer from Zagreb and fan of latest and cutting-edge technologies will let you know more about it.

Join us! RSVP here so that we can reserve you a seat!

Last thing we ask is that you help our speakers with a big round of feedback. Tell them what you liked about their talk or what you think they should improve. You have our eternal gratitude!

Published: March 27th, 2015

One cool initiative from Andreas Heigl landed in our inbox few days ago. In short, there is a Slack team for PHP user groups. If you want to join, request an invitation. Both links are aslo on php.ug.

You can find a lot of familiar faces at #phpsee channel.

Published: March 22nd, 2015

Honestly? We have no idea, but meetup in March was pretty cool. As usual, we had two speakers and some group announcements.

Announcements

There is still time to plan your trip to Sarajevo this Tuesday. On March 24th there will be a first ever PHP meetup.

GrUSP is organising their annual PhpDay 2015 conference in Verona. They are in the process of making the final list of speakers so do not count that sweet early bird discount will last much longer. If you are interested in attending let us know as they were kind enough to give our user group a discount.

In Belgrade, PHP Serbia is once again organising themed conference - SOLIDay. It is dedicated to software architecture and good design principle and will host a list of great names from PHP world: Shawn McCool, Rob Allen, Mathias Verraes, Paweł Jędrzejewski, Marco Pivetta and Brandon Savage. Be on the lookout, as they will soon start selling tickets.

No words need to be spent on Netgen, our dear friends and active supporters. They are again throwing a tutorial based conferences dedicated to PHP & Symfony and eZ Publish. You can expect three days of workshops and one very cool excursion.

Last but not least, our very own WebCamp Zagreb 2015 conference. Call for papers is out, we are looking for speakers and interesting topics. If you want to be a part of WebCamp as an attendee, note that tickets are selling fast at early bird price of 300 kn so we suggest you jump on them as soon as possible if you do not want to miss out. Alternatively, you can speak at your local user group and get a ticket for free. You can also help our speakers by leaving a helpful feedback on joind.in and we will draw one name that gets a free ticket as well.

Talks

We had two amazing talks! Slaven Vincetić shared his tips and tricks for handling junior developers and encouraging senior developers to contribute with their experience in a talk named Luke, I'm your father. After the break, Marin Crnković introduced us to SaltStack.

Next meetup

We are busy preparing our next meetup - same place, same time: Mama, Preradovićeva 18 from 5:30pm. There will be talks on Yii2 by Fatos Hoti and ZeroMQ by Silvio Marijić. RSVP if you want to come.

Published: March 5th, 2015

Oh boi, what a lineup! Can't wait until March 19th to visit Mama, Preradoviceva 18 and listen to these guys and what they have to say.

First up, how to create elite jedi order of developers and to ensure that the quality of every project, task or bugfix will be on a desired level. Slaven Vincetić from Degordian will share his tips and tricks for handling junior developers and encouraging senior developers to contribute with their experience. All that, packed in a talk, with lots of references to Star Wars.

Slaven worked with many Italian startups where he played with handful of technologies (elastic search, knockoutjs, gearman) but at the same time noticed a lot of bad development practices and even worse business processes. He gets to use what he learned the hard way in Degordian and escape into development every now and then.

After the break, Marin Crnković from web.burza will introduce us to SaltStack - provisioning system that looks to stir some fun in field traditionally owned by Chef, Puppet and Ansible. Enter SaltStack, the remote execution, configuration management system that uses YAML files (psst, they are in fact Twig!). This talk will provide a crash course on the basics of Salt with some examples and use cases and to get you from "I install my software by hand" to "I used to install by hand, but now I love my life".

Marin is a passionate web developer, lover of all things pre-alpha, tinkerer, father of two, husband of one, living in Zagreb.

Join us! RSVP here so that we can reserve you a seat!

Last thing we ask is that you help our speakers with a big round of feedback. Tell them what you liked about their talk or what you think they should improve. You have our eternal gratitude!