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, the DC PHP Developer's Group will be hearing from Eric Mandel. Eric is the owner of Blackmesh, a server hosting company, and he will speak on optimization, a topic he is uniquely qualified to discuss.

The details:

Date and Time: Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Location: 702 H Street, NW, Suite 300, Washington, D.C. 20001.

Nearest Metro is Gallery Place/Chinatown.

RSVP is not required, but we've had record crowds so be sure to be on time to secure a seat!

If you've found this place already, please pardon the dust, we're redecorating.

Since the DCPHP group was founded in 2005, it has grown significantly. We started with a little list of about 60 people and a monthly meeting that normally happened. Somewhere along the way, we've had three conferences (2006, 2007, 2008), grown to over 250 people, and have three monthly meetings.

More importantly, somewhere along the way, we became a community. We went from being this group of individuals in isolation struggling with the same little PHP problems to a group of people that get together for a drink or discussion, keep in touch, and struggle with the same little PHP problems. ;)

Regardless, welcome to our site and don't forget to sign up for the mailing list (that box on the upper right).