Hi there, Full Stack Antwerp
First published on April 24, 2018 · Last updated on May 9, 2020
The last couple of years have been a pretty crazy ride for us at PHP Antwerp. We went from a handful of attendees to over 800 members on our meetup.com page. We’ve seen our events grow to over 40 regular attendees for each user group. We’ve organized 28 evetjts and hosted more than 50 speakers. It’s amazing to see to how the user group has evolved.
As a PHP user group we have a strong connection to the broader PHP community here in Belgium and beyond. We’re very happy to be part of 6 dedicated user groups in Belgium who are putting their time and effort into hosting their events and we’re glad to call each and one of them our friends.
But if we look at our last couple of events over the past year we feel like we can no longer identify our user group to just PHP. We’ve been been hosting events with a variety of different topics including JavaScript, DevOps, soft skills and all sorts of other topics concerning web development and programming in general.
That’s why we decided to re-brand ourselves as Full Stack Antwerp. We do this because we want to be more inclusive to other types of developers besides PHP developers and and to be open and welcoming to everyone who’s interested in learning and networking about programming and web development.
You don’t need to be a full stack developer to attend our events. We are welcoming everyone who’s interested in programming, whether it’s front-end, back-end, devops or more.
So what changes? Well, besides our new name and logo not much really. We’ll continue to host events like we do now, offering the same type of talks as we did over the past year and so on. We’ll still keep a strong connection to our friends in the PHP community and still be giving PHP talks amongst others. We’re just opening up the possibility to offer a more diverse range of talks.
Besides our re-branding we also have something else to announce. We’re starting a new Slack community called Full Stack Belgium for the entire developer community in Belgium. Here, we aim to offer a single place where Belgian developers can join and share knowledge, network and help each other out. We want to offer a safe place and bring developers in Belgium closer together. Give it a try and join us at fullstackbelgium.be!
We’re excited for the future to see where our new path leads us. Hopefully we’ll see you at one our upcoming events. Our next event is planned for the end of May and we hope to see you there!
Rias, Freek & Dries
About me
I'm a software engineer from Belgium. I work as one of the core team members of Laravel, the popular PHP framework.
I'm also the creator of Eventy, a platform that connects the dots between user groups, speakers, conferences and attendees.
My passions are open-source, growing communities, and building products that people love.
