Back from Disneyland Paris: our recap of the SymfonyCon 2022

On November 17th and 18th, the international Symfony community finally met for an epic SymfonyCon 2022 in the fun atmosphere of Disney’s Hotel New York – the Art of Marvel. SymfonyCon Disneyland 2022 was THE Symfony conference of the year with great announcements, remarkable speakers, and of course, an amazing party.

This year again, as the creator of Symfony, SensioLabs was a Diamond sponsor of the SymfonyCon. After two online SymfonyCon editions, it was the first in-person international Symfony conference. We enjoyed a lot meeting again Symfony developers from all over the world. This year, the 2022 SymfonyCon edition took place in the brand-new Marvel hotel in Disneyland Paris.

During the breaks, we welcomed the attendees at our booth with goodies. The Sponsors’ Room was huge and gorgeous, with all the sponsors organizing new and creative challenges. Throughout the conference, our team had the opportunity to talk and share our common passion for Symfony with the attendees.

Many participants tried their luck 🍀 at our two challenges:

• The famous Symfony & PHP Skills Challenge on SensioLabs University Platform. The participants could win one month of free access to our eLearning Platform or a Symfony elePHPant plush.
• The new Comics Photo Challenge. Attendees had to post on Twitter a selfie of them in front of our comics-inspired wall with masks, speech bubbles, or onomatopoeia. The participant with the most likes won a coveted Symfony elePHPant plush.

SymfonyCon Disneyland 2022 was also the opportunity to launch SensioLabs Deutschland officially.

For a few months, we have worked with creativestyle, our preferred partner in Germany, to re-create SensioLabs Deutschland. You can read our blog post 📰 to learn more about SensioLabs Deutschland and the benefits for German companies and developers.

The SensioLabs Deutschland team was at our booth to explain this exciting new project. They could connect with many German-speaking Symfony users.

To celebrate SensioLabs Deutschland’s first steps, we brought a typical German pretzel booth to the conference. The attendees enjoyed delicious pretzels and a unique Christmas market atmosphere.

This year again, it was hard to choose which talk to watch: there were great speakers everywhere. That being said, our technical team picked three favorite talks (Fabien Potencier’s keynote standing, of course, beyond this ranking):

• “Unleashing the power of lazy objects in PHP” by Nicolas Grekas. We loved this fresh and inspiring talk. Nicolas Grekas showed that even if Lazy Objects seem hard to implement, you can do it very easily and quickly in fact.

• “From a legacy Monolith to a Symfony Service Oriented Architecture with zero downtime” by Clément Bertillon, software architect and trainer at SensioLabs. Clément Bertillon gave a hands-on talk for Symfony developers. He explained how to go from a monolith to an SOA while maintaining a live and permanent production.
• “7 Lessons You Can Learn From Disney Movies” by Stefan Koopmanschap. Stefan Koopmanschap showed how the lessons learned from Disney movies can apply to a developer’s career. He explored 7 situations from some of his favorite Disney movies, analyzing them and showing what lessons to learn. It was fun and very connected to the place of the conference.

Symfony conferences are always the opportunity for the SensioLabs team to meet and share real moments of conviviality. Because we are working from many places in France, remotely or in an office, it is essential to reunite in person a few times a year.

First of all, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of SensioLabs with champagne and a gorgeous layer cake 🍰 Fabien Potencier and Grégory Pascal, the founders of Symfony and SensioLabs, were with us for this great milestone.

Then, we all headed to the SymfonyCon party. Symfony privatized the Walt Disney Studios Park for the participants at the conference. It was amazing! There was no queue at all to enjoy the attractions. We felt privileged to have the entire park for ourselves.

We had so much fun taking a ride on the roller coasters and discovering the brand-new Avengers Campus before having a hamburger together. It was epic, like every moment of these two days at the SymfonyCon Disneyland 2022.

Many thanks to Symfony for organizing this awesome event and to the speakers for their enlightening talks. You will soon be able to replay all the talks of the conference by purchasing a ticket on the Symfony conferences website.

As for us, we can’t wait to see you next year in Brussels ⚛️🍟 for the SymfonyCon 2023!