Between 11/23 and 11/27, I traveled from Chapecó to Porto Alegre to attend the 16th PHP Conference Brazil, along with a few coworkers and with support from IXCSoft. The event took place at Unisinos.

It was my first time at this event, where I got to spend time with several people who actively take part in the PHP community in Brazil and who have a positive influence on it.

I managed to attend several talks and, most importantly, learn a bit more about the history of some developers with 20+ years of PHP experience, some of them among the pioneers of the language in the country.

I also got to know some excellent projects running PHP and discovered how much the community loves Laravel and other current frameworks. That's something I need to practice more, I'm not a daily framework user, but I noticed the market in the big cities relies heavily on them for faster delivery.

Another thing that really caught my attention was how engaged people were with the event, they love the PHP ecosystem and language! And that's something I share with great pleasure.

The IXC team. From left to right: me, Matheus, Franklin, Gustavo, and André.

Making the most of the trip, and being a football (soccer) fan, on the way back we stopped to check out the stadiums of the big football clubs from Rio Grande do Sul, and of course I root for Grêmio.

Grêmio's stadium.

Statue of the club's biggest idol, Renato Gaúcho.

The event pushed me to move forward with something I'd been thinking about for a while: contributing more to the community, even without being a language expert, I know I can help people with some content and I plan to set aside more time for that.

I recently read an article by Joe Watkins, which says that to contribute to the language you don't need to write in the C language or come up with a framework, you can contribute in other ways like producing content, answering questions, attending events, translating the documentation, and so on, and that was one of the motivations for starting this blog.

To wrap up, congratulations to the event organizers for spreading the language and wanting to keep it more alive than ever!

I just wished I'd found an ElePHPant to buy and take home lol