Aditya Mooley

The first ever PHP meetup in Nagpur was conducted today, 11 July, 2009. Around 31 people attended the meetup with variety of backgrounds and experience.

Team at PHP Meetup

There were freshers, starters, experienced and highly experienced professionals who shared their views. Few PHP trainers in the city also turned up for the meetup in a bid to understand the industry requirements which is a very welcome sign for the PHP community in Nagpur.

The meetup started with introduction from everyone followed by Dr. Tarique Sani’s encouraging speech on Opensource for the new community members. He stressed the need of giving back something to the Opensource community which has given us the hugely popular LAMP platform.

Since it was the first meetup, there was no fix agenda for it and so everyone was given a freehand to ask their questions, share their experience, etc. As usual, the freshers were interested in knowing the career opportunity in PHP and the current position of PHP in the market.

But the real stuff came in from the PHP developers. The main concern shown by everyone was the Security in web applications. We were very pleased to see the people talking about SQL injection and cross site scripting (XSS) which nobody bothered about an year ago. A lot of discussion happened on these topics and we finally decided that this needs a special attention.

So, the next meetup, which will be on the 2nd Saturday of next month (8 August 2009), will have a special session on Security in web applications where we will demonstrate the SQL injection and XSS and possible ways to avoid them. And fortunately, I was chosen for this job of giving the first talk of this meetup.

Finally, it was also decided to start a new mailing list for Nagpur PHP  community members to help eachother.

Everyone then posed for a group photo which you can see above and went home happily

I take this opportunity to thank everyone who attended this meetup and made it a successful event. We are also thankful to the two leading English daily’s in Nagpur, The Hitwada and Time of India for publishing the information about this meetup. We got lot of enquiries through them.

Keep watching this blog for more information on the meetup or follow me on Twitter for updates on meetup.