Organizing Full Stack Europe
Published on September 14, 2022
It's been over seven years since I started with organizing user group events in Antwerp back in 2015. Back then the user group was called PHP Antwerp and was a niche focussed on PHP developers, the community I myself was a part of. After a few years it became clear the user group had evolved into so much more. Developers from all sorts of backgrounds were giving talks about various subjects not related to PHP at all. We also learned some people were hesitant of attending the events, thinking it would only be about PHP while in reality it wasn't. So things needed to change.
We decided to rebrand the user group as Full Stack Belgium and also host events in Ghent. This to reach a wider audience and to allow a bigger crowd to participate. We immediately saw a difference in attendee numbers and people seemed excited that the group had opened up to become more welcoming for different developer backgrounds. Things grew a lot over that initial year and we were regularly hosting events, up to 2 times a month.
After a while we started thinking about taking the next step and organizing a bigger event, a conference. We wanted to start slow and small and build up over the years. We had no experience ourselves with organizing such a large event so we didn't want to take much risk by immediately going big. Luckily we met the nice people at Aardling who were eager to help out. Thanks to them we could immediately scale the conference to a bigger format. With them helping out with logistics, etc and us covering the speakers and content, we went right on track with hosting a great event.
In October 2019 we hosted the first edition of Full Stack Europe. Things went very well for our first edition and 250 people attended. We were looking forward to the next year with the 2020 edition. Unfortunately Covid came in between and we had to wait a full three years before we could host the next edition.
Now, our 2022 edition is almost upon us. We're super happy about the amazing line-up we were able to get together again. Full Stack Europe really is the conference for the entire team. We don't want to focus on any niche but instead want you to learn from various parts of the stack. There's talks about database indexing, event systems, version control, security, CSS, etc. At Full Stack Europe no talk is the same and combined with our lightning talks you'll really get plenty of content.
We're so happy to finally be organising the conference again. It's the fruition of years of work and together with all of you we want it to be an event worth remembering. See you there?
About me
I'm a software engineer from Belgium and work as one of the core team members of Laravel, the popular PHP framework.
Together with my buddy Rias, we're also the creators of Eventy, a platform that connects the dots between user groups, speakers, conferences and attendees.
I'm also the maintainer of Laravel.io, the Laravel community portal, where the community can ask questions, share knowledge, and connect with each other.
My passions are open-source, growing communities, and building products that people love.
