Tomorrow, March 10th, at 7:00 pm we'll have our monthly meeting. This meeting is held at Fathom Creative, which is located at 1333 14th St, NW, Washington DC.

Shaun Farrell will be moderating the meeting. This month we are doing a series of short talks, focusing on ongoing or past projects in the DC PHP community where the community members want to share the tips and tricks of what they did. We've got a great lineup of short speakers tomorrow night, but you'll have to come if you want to find out who. There will probably also be a group heading for drinks after the meeting, if you care to tag along.

Obviously everyone is aware of the heavy snow we've had and are forecast to receive starting tonight and lasting into tomorrow. Given the challenging conditions, I've been asked by several people what our plan are for the DC PHP meeting, scheduled for this Wednesday.

After talking with the speaker and Keith Casey, and debating rescheduling or having a virtual meeting, it appears that our best option at this point will be to postpone until next week. The host has indicated that it is possible for us to move the meeting. I will confirm with them and make an announcement later this week.

This month, we'll once again be meeting at Fathom Creative, which is located at 1333 14th St, NW, Washington DC. We'll be hearing from Shaun Farrell who will be giving us an overview of the Zend Framework.

Title: Intro to Zend Framework (What you can do out of the box)
Description: Will take you through a rapid intro to Zend Framework (ZF) showing 80% of what you can do out of the box! Look at the architecture of ZF and will walk through some commonly used components that make life simpler and then look at some code of a small demo app.
Time: 7:00 pm, February 10th, 2010

Shaun tells me that it will be about 30 minutes of slides, 30 minutes of code, and a bit of time for Q&A, so be prepared for a bit of a longer meeting than usual. This is one of the most requested talks we've had, so it should be enjoyable!

This month we have a different location for the DC PHP Developer's Group meeting, as Greenpeace is out of the office on an all-staff retreat.

We will be meeting at Fathom Creative, which is located at 1333 14th St, NW, Washington DC (you can see a Google map here: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Fathom+Creative,+Washington,+DC). This is Anthony D. Paul's company, and he tells us that employees use Dupont Circle, McPherson Square and Shaw-Howard to access the site. Afterwards, Keith Casey will lead the brave to a spot for some drinks.

The meeting description:

MongoDB: NoSQL Made Easy

This talk will cover why and how to use MongoDB, addressing the following topics:
• Scaling with MongoDB (replica pairs, master/slave, sharding)
• Creating a schema for a non-relational
• Basic MongoDB syntax
• Interesting MongoDB features for developers (capped collections, file storage, upserts)

Bio: Kristina Chodorow is a software engineer at 10gen, where she wrote and maintains the MongoDB PHP driver (available through PECL). Kristina has spoken at meetups and conferences around the world.

This month we're excited to be hearing from Raphael Mudge.

Raphael Mudge from Automattic (think WordPress.com) is coming to talk to us about After the Deadline - a software service that uses artificial intelligence to check spelling, style, and grammar in web applications. The entire package (including the server) is open source and front-end plugins exist for jQuery and TinyMCE. In his talk Raphael will demonstrate the technology, give us an overview of how it works, talk about how they use it on WordPress.com, and show us how we can use After the Deadline in our applications.

The meeting will be at Greenpeace USA headquarters, which are located at 702 H Street, NW, Suite 300, Washington, D.C. 20001. The meeting is December 9th, 2009 at 7:00 pm. See everyone there!

Ben Colombini was kind enough to forward us the slides, which are posted here. Enjoy!

Codeworks DC - October 2nd - 3rd

This is the DC arrival of the Codeworks conference. Along with this will be two receptions; one on Friday, October 2nd and another on Saturday, October 3rd. Keith Casey is still putting together details for me and we will get them out as soon as possible.

Beverage Subgroup - DC Chapter - October 7th

This is a time to get together with PHPers and chat about whatever. There's no set agenda, and no requirements, beyond having a beer and enjoying the company of others. Barry Austin arranges the DC Beverage Subgroup, and your reservation is appreciated (so we can give accurate numbers to the hostess).

Location: Gordon Biersch, 900 F St NW, Washington DC
Time: 6:30 pm

DC PHP Developer's Group Meeting - October 14th

This month's DC PHP meeting will be led by Ben Columbini of DC PHP, LLC. He will be giving everyone an OOP boot camp, in preparation for next month's meeting, which will be on PHP design patterns.

Location: Greenpeace, 702 H Street, NW, Suite 300, Washington, D.C. 20001
Time: 7:00 pm

Beverage Subgroup - Virginia Chapter - October 27th

This is a time to get together with PHPers and chat about whatever. There's no set agenda, and no requirements, beyond having a beer and enjoying the company of others. Keith Casey arranges the Virginia Beverage Subgroup, and your reservation is appreciated (so we can give accurate numbers to the hostess).

Location: Ireland Four Courts, 2051 Wilson Blvd, Arlington VA
Time: 6:00 pm

The 2009 DC PHP conference is fast approaching. The conference is September 16th - 17th at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Visit the conference website for more information and to get your tickets.

Members of the DC PHP Developer's Group are eligible for a discounted ticket, as thanks for their support of the DC PHP community.