Our SymfonyWorld 2020 recap: A promising first online conference

The annual international meeting of the Symfony community took place on December 3rd and 4th, 2020. Initially, the SymfonyCon 2020 was supposed to take place in Disneyland Paris. But due to the current pandemic situation, Symfony organized an online conference: the SymfonyWorld 2020. We could experience this new Symfony conference format from home, with attendees connected from all over the world.

This year, SensioLabs team had the opportunity to attend the SymfonyWorld 2020 as a Diamond sponsor. This new online conference format gathered more than 1,500 attendees on December 3rd and 4th.

We could meet virtually on a platform named Hopin. On the conference platform, Symfony released high-profile conferences, and shared with us this great community reunion in accordance with the sanitary rules. We enjoyed using this platform: Hopin offers many very useful features such as multiple discussion threads to chat live, ask questions or answer polls.

Talks took place in virtual rooms named tracks, and one of the tracks was sponsored by SensioLabs. Every talk was pre-recorded to ensure the best online experience. Speakers were connected to answer live questions from the audience.

In two days, we could hear an amazing set of talks about PHP and Symfony. This year, Nicolas Grekas opened the discussion with a Pre-Keynote. He highlighted the progress of the Symfony community and how to contribute to Symfony. Then, it was time for Fabien Potencier’s eagerly anticipated keynote. Fabien surprised the audience by announcing the launch of the Symfony UX Initiative (find his slides clicking here) : a new JavaScript ecosystem for Symfony. Fabien also announced that Titouan Galopin, in charge of the UX Initiative, will join the Symfony core team.

We loved so many talks. It would have been great to review them all, but we decided to reveal our top 3 only:

• “Keynote: What’s new in PHP 8.0?” by Nikita Popov: Nikita Popov is one of the main contributors to PHP. In his brilliant keynote, he showed us the brand new features introduced in PHP 8 to make life easier for developers.
• “Dependency Injection Demystified” by Alexander M. Turek: Dependency Injection has never been so clear thanks to Alexander Turek’s presentation.
• “Symfony meet Cypress – E2E testing for Symfony developers” by Ramona Schwering: Cypress is a pretty interesting tool compared to Behat, it currently draws a lot of attention to solve end-to-end testing issues.

If you were not able to attend the SymfonyWorld 2020 or if you just want to replay the talks, you can now watch the video recordings online. Your conference ticket gives you access to this content. And you can still buy your ticket on the SymfonyWorld website.

Beyond the talks, SymfonyWorld is always a great community reunion. This year, we celebrated the 15th anniversary of Symfony: Happy Birthday Symfony! 🥳 For this special occasion, customized 15-years Symfony elePHPants are available for sale on the Symfony shop. A nice video also reminded us the milestones of the last 15 years within the Symfony community.

This year, there were neither booths, nor goodies! But we had a networking space to video chat randomly with another participant. Like if you were meeting someone at the buffet. Sponsors had virtual booths in the Expo area.

It has been such a joy to welcome you on SensioLabs virtual booth, and to talk with attendees from many countries in the world. We hope you enjoyed our demos on SensioLabs University and expertise solutions. We also replayed our last webinar on development quality assurance plans associated with SymfonyInsight. Many attendees also entered the SensioLabs University eLearning Platform challenge, which was a success. So our two days at SymfonyWorld 2020 were quite busy!

Congratulations to Symfony for the success of the SymfonyWorld 2020 that made us possible to meet again despite the travel restrictions.

Next year, the SymfonyCon 2021 will plunge us into the magical world of Disneyland ✨ It will take place on December 2nd and 3rd, 2021, at Disneyland Paris. You can already book your tickets on the SymfonyCon website. We are looking forward to seeing you there!