This year php[tek] is back, and it’s in Chicago. If you’ve been connected to the PHP community for any length of time you’ll know why that means a lot to many PHP developers. And this year we’re sending the entire PhoneBurner development team.
Community
PHP is a community powered language. The community of PHP developers — both those that use the language and those in the core — are instrumental in the growth and improvement of the language. As a company proudly built on PHP, engaging with the community as a company and a team is key to our success.
As a company we want to be a part of the conversation about the future of the language. It’s not that we want to influence that conversation, we want to know where the language is heading. But not just the language itself, we want to be aware of the general direction component libraries, open source projects, and thought leaders in the community are taking. And yes, we want to have a voice when it makes sense.
How does a company engage with a community? If we want it to be effective it’s pretty simple. We engage as individuals. Because if our team members are also active members of the PHP community, gauging the direction of the language is pretty simple — we just ask our team.
And let’s be honest. The community may not be all that interested in PhoneBurner at all. But I’m guessing they will be interested in how Andy took a pretty simple set of traits and made exceptions that are also HTTP responses. Or how Joseph implemented a cache-like layer that completely changed how we leverage our hypermedia APIs in the browser. I know they’ll be interested in how Conor and Phil have helped define boundaries and refine testing that API client code. Then Aaron and Josh have plenty to talk about when it comes to building APIs by starting with the OpenAPI spec, or maybe they’ll hit up Boctor for the story of the bug that was just a single cent off. And I’m sure Jack and Brandon will have plenty of questions around how the infrastructure they maintain handles millions of calls every month.
That may not be how every company tries to engage with the community. But it’s how we’re doing it. So we need to be where the community is, and if there’s one thing consistent about php[tek] it’s that you find the community there. So that’s where you’ll find us.
Continuous (Developer) Improvement
In my mind community is enough reason, but that’s not the only value. Not only do we want our team of developers to be engaged with the PHP community, we also want them to be improving their craft.
We want that, and they want that. We hire developers that want to be continually getting better at what they do. That’s why we encourage taking some time (paid, of course) every month focused on learning something new. That’s why we have regular team meetings to discuss topics, best practices, recently published articles and to challenge our thinking.
But what if we could take a few days and focus just on improving our skill set, expanding our understanding, and discovering solutions we may have never considered? We’re a fully remote team, so what if we could do all that in person?
For us, php[tek] is one part of a very important effort to ensure we’re consistently improving ourselves. It allows us to do that in person and be accountable to each other as we split up and head to different talks. Then as we share what we’ve learned, we end up speaking the same language because we’ve done it together.
Careers
I took a look at our past hiring and found that when we hired developers that were already engaged with the community, they tended to stay longer than those that weren’t. Of course ‘longer’ is a little hard to gauge as many still work here (a really good thing). But if we just look at the first year, it’s clearly more likely that a developer with community ties will make it past that one year mark.
So guess what pool we want to hire from?
The community is enough reason; the professional development is enough reason; but on top of that, we get to meet some of our future team members when we go to php[tek].
And no, not because we’re trying to hire up all the speakers and thought leaders in the PHP community — but if you’re one of them and looking, you know where to find me.
You see, there’s going to be a bright, somewhat junior developer who has fought to convince their company to send them to a conference. It wasn’t easy, and they had to twist some arms, but they got it done. They’re taking detailed notes on every talk they go to, because unless they can come back and impart some knowledge to the rest of the team, they’ve been told that sending them to the conference wasn’t really ‘worth it’.
That developer is going to run into someone that works for PhoneBurner (since we’re all there), and they’re going to realize that there is a company where all the developers care about continually improving and learning from each other, and the company does too. And then eventually they’re going to leave and come join our team. Because if we’re not hiring now, we will be in the future, and we’re going to make sure we reach out to them when we are.
There’s also going to be a well rounded senior level developer who’s given up trying to get reimbursed, and just takes the PTO and covers the expenses themselves. They’re going to start up a conversation with one of our team after a talk. It won’t take long for some introductions to be made, and them to be on a team that shares the same perspective.
And if either of those developers worked for you, I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m not. After all, that’s why you should be sending your team to php[tek]. And fortunately, it’s not too late to get tickets (yes, that is a discount link) and see us there.
