Our recap of SymfonyCon 2019: Amsterdam, a record participation and Symfony 5

The SensioLabs team attended SymfonyCon 2019, which took place from November 21 to 23 in Amsterdam. Throughout 3 days of tech conferences, great meetings with the Symfony community and casual side events, they share with us their impressions and best memories of a record-breaking SymfonyCon.

SymfonyCon 2019 Amsterdam

It has already been a month since SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2019, the largest SymfonyCon ever in terms of attendance. With more than 1,600 attendees, Symfony has reached a significant milestone: this is a record number that demonstrates the Symfony community growth all over the world.

At SensioLabs, we were very proud to stand once again as a Diamond sponsor at the SymfonyCon 2019, Symfony’s annual international conference.

This year, Symfony did things big, choosing the Beurs van Berlage, a magnificent brick building that used to house the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Located in the heart of Amsterdam, it was the ideal venue for the conference.

For 2 days, we had the opportunity to attend high-level conferences on Symfony and PHP. SymfonyCon started in the best way from the very first morning with Symfony 5 live release by Fabien himself. Symfony 5 looks very promising and will significantly improve developer experience. We will surely give you more information about Symfony 5 on this blog in 2020.

Fabien Potencier SymfonyCon

Several conferences were quite impactful to us:

  • HTTP/3: It’s all about the transport” with Benoît Jacquemont: Benoît made it very clear and he well explained HTTP protocol version 3 benefits.
  • Prime Time with Messenger: Queues, Workers & more Fun!” with Ryan Weaver: Ryan has a talent for explaining in a simple way this main new Symfony component.
  • PHPUnit Best Practices” with Sebastian Bergmann: the creator of PHPUnit gave us tons of good advice on how to best use unit tests.

The conference videos are already available online on SymfonyCasts (and therefore on SensioLabs University), feel free to have a look at the platform.

SymfonyCon Amsterdam was also a fantastic deep dive into the Symfony community. Lots of Core Team members were attending and they were very easy to reach: just say hi and ask about a component, how to contribute to Symfony, etc.

Participants SymfonyCon 2019

Beside the conferences, we had the chance to talk to many Symfony enthusiasts with various tech issues, and we also sometimes met again familiar faces. A lot of Dutch attended the conference – Symfony is widely used in the Netherlands – but there were also Germans, French, Poles, etc. more than 50 countries were represented.

On our stand, we organized a PHP / Symfony quiz on SensioLabs University. Participants were asked to answer 10 complex questions about PHP and Symfony as quickly as possible. Three prizes were distributed and the competition was fierce. Our goodies were also super popular: we gave out almost all our webcam covers, coasters, candies and stickers to attendees!

Stand SensioLabs SymfonyCon

© Julien Pauli

Congratulations to the organizers who managed the conference with an expert hand! Meals, the Social Event, the Hack Day, etc. everything was done to make sure people get the most out of SymfonyCon and spend a good time.

Finally, SymfonyCon was also an opportunity for us to introduce our new SensioLabs sweatshirts, as you can see in the picture below 😉

équipe SensioLabs SymfonyCon

© Julien Pauli

Next year, SymfonyCon 2020 will bring us to the wonderful world of Disney. It will take place from December 3 to 5 at Disneyland Paris and tickets are already on sale at the early bird rate. Save the date and join us in 2020 in the enchanted realm of Symfony!

SymfonyCon 2020 Disneyland Paris