Attendees introduced themselves.
Intent behind the creation of the group was communicated by Guillermo A. Fisher (GAF) and Singlee "JP" Muray (SJM).
Floor opened to ideas about what people wanted to take away from the group:
- Presentations should be made
- Get outsiders if possible
- People in the group are interested in presenting as well
- Presentation Topics
- PHPunit
- Composer
- Technologies Used w/PHP
- Solr
- Memcache
- PHP Basics
- Object Oriented PHP development
- Test Driven Development
- PDO
- Frameworks
- Problem-solving
- Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Phing, Bamboo)
- Benefits of using an Integrated Development Environment
- SOLID principles
- Uncle Bob Videos
- Design Patterns
- Object Calistenics
- Refactoring Exercises
- xDebug
- Service Oriented Architecture
- Sounding Board
- Reese Howell (RH) mentioned that the meetups would be a great opportunity for bouncing ideas off other developers
- Mentoring Opportunities
- SJP communicated while ideas about presentations were being discussed that senior developers could help to mentor some of the less-experienced devs
- Troy Connor (TC), RH, and Brandon Shoop (BS) cited lack of preparation and experience offered in undergrad programs across the board
- Other attendees confirmed lack of exposure to PHP in undergrad
- TC will tell other ODU students about the meetup
Discussed format for upcoming meetups
- 30 minutes Sounding Board/general discussion
- 30 minutes for presentation
- Hold once a month and revisit as group grows. May need to hold meetings twice a month.
- Have a quarterly competition of some sort
- Code golf and other similar activities
GAF floated idea of working on a site together
- Rough requirements proposed:
- Twitter Account, hook it into the site
- Presentations section
- Calendar
- Recordings
- Forum with support for email replies (not requiring you to login to participate)
- Social Login
- SOA-based
- About The Group
- PHP Resources
- Templates
- Snippet of the week
- Blog
- Voted on our approach. Considered developing a framework from scratch, ZF2, Yii, Symfony, CakePHP. Voted on ZF2, although some members still feel strongly that we should work on our own framework to benefit from lessons that can be learned.
Heath Padrick (HP) agreed to do a talk on Composer for the next meetup