PHP Community Conference Talk Proposal: #phpfundamentals

[Stuart Herbert]

This is the email that I just sent to the organisers of phpcon.org, to
see if we can get the word out about what this group is trying to
achieve.

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Hi,

I'd love to come to the PHP Community Conference in April and talk
about the #phpfundamentals project, explaining the background of the
project, our goals, how it benefits the PHP community, and how the
wider community can get involved.

#phpfundamentals[1] was started last year by Jeremy Coates (PHP
NorthWest community organiser, #phpnw conference organiser, Managing
Director for Magma Digital), Rob Allen (Zend Framework Community
Review team member, Technical Director for Big Room Internet) and
myself Stuart Herbert (PHP SouthWest community organiser, Head of
Engineering for Gradwell). Our goal is to address the skills gaps in
the PHP community at all levels by producing both a comprehensive
syllabus and the supporting training material to empower the community
to train itself, and the means necessary to build up a professional
portfolio of evidence to help developers land the next job in their
careers.

In 2011, PHP developers should not be going to conferences to hear
about source control for the first time, nor unit testing, nor
preventing SQL injection attacks. These are just three of many _many_
examples of skills that should be considered fundamental to anyone who
wants to be a professional developer. The problem to date is that
there simply isn't one place that professionals can go to in order to
learn the whole craft. The result is a shortage of competent
professionals today, but even worse is that the next generation of
developers are graduating from universities to discover that they are
unemployable.

And all this at a time that PHP is finally gaining traction as a
viable alternative to Java and .NET for serious application
development.

I want to come to the PHP Community Conference and talk about what
we've put together so far, learn from others in the community where
they see the gaps are, and find ways to take this forward to become a
community-maintained syllabus. There's an exciting opportunity for
our community to define and shape ourselves and our profession like
never before, and I'm hoping that between us we can do so.

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/phpfundamentals

Best regards,
Stu
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