See you at PHP Benelux…

Covid really wreaked havoc on the in-person conference and meetup scene. In the UK, where I live, we’ve only seen a handful of meetups bounce back. Slowly but surely, some of them are returning, but even then: I’d hazard many of them don’t have the same level of attendance as “the before times.” Conferences are a similar story. Many of the Roave team members are regular speakers and attendees at events across the world, and we’ve made many great friends and formed great business relationships at conferences, so we really did notice a difference after Covid hit.

Honestly though, I do think the conference scene needed a bit of a shake up. We had seen the number of regional and small conferences really skyrocket. Being one of the organisers of the PHP South Coast Conference, which ran from 2015 through to 2017, I know this first hand – one of the biggest challenges was onboarding sponsors to subsidise the costs of running it. What was quite eye-opening is many sponsors considered these regional conferences just too small-fry to invest in. Their ROI just wasn’t high enough, which totally makes sense. This made running these little community-focused conferences quite difficult – with limited funding being split between more, smaller conferences.

That said, the conference speakers at Roave still always found it beneficial to present at and attend even these smaller conferences and meetups – primarily for the networking aspect. Making those friends and contacts is incredibly rewarding, and engaging directly with the community, hearing feedback, and being able to help solve problems in-person is really beneficial.

Now fast-forward to a few days ago: I was casually browsing Mastodon when something really exciting caught my eye. One of my personal favourite conferences, PHP Benelux, located in Antwerp, is returning after several years of hiatus. The call for papers is open until the end of October, and even if you aren’t speaking, I recommend attending this conference if you can. It’s a great community gathering, and I’m super pleased to see it back. It’ll be my first conference of 2027, and then I’m hoping to make it to another stellar community conference which is a regular feature of the Roave calendar, and again one of my favourite community conferences – phpday in Italy, to be held in May 2027.

Just one thing to note – we do run the Roave Discord, and we have a great and growing community there. We sometimes organise mini gatherings at various conferences, which are exclusive to Roave Discord community members – so make sure you join us over at https://discord.gg/roave to gain access to these events too.

Photo from phpday 2026 by Rob Allen, used with permission.