July 18, 2005
Saturday afternoon I went to the Twin Cities PHP User Group meeting, my third time ever. Finding the Renaissance Box is interesting enough. Actually managing to find a way into the building and up to the meeting location is the real challenge. Apparently past meetings were even worse, when they were held at MPR offices downtown and attendees had to social engineer their way into the building. We joked about doing that every month: pick a random office building and finagle our way in to a conference room.
Most of the meeting was host Allie Micka talking about Apache & PHP configuration security, and caching. Things I took with me from the meeting:
Minnesota West webmaster -- excuse me, web architect -- Anoop Atre was in attendance with his brother, and we grabbed a cup of coffee afterwards. Good to see you, Anoop.
I'm bemused by (or at least made hesitant about) my involvement with this group. I'm not sure how much time I have to give it. On the one hand, it's interesting that I never made the time to regularly attend meetings until some months after I stopped using PHP on a daily basis. On the other hand, the more I work with Java for web development, the more I appreciate PHP. It's fun. I expect that I'll end up going to more meetings, if nothing else as a nice break from work. It's what I like about my job, but it's not my job, and that's a big difference, bigger than I realized.
