Chicago is famous for many reasons, including the Bears, a specific style of hot dogs, and, of course, for giving the world skyscrapers. PHP is also known for legendary architecture, being the underlying language for 77.5% of the web via frameworks like Laravel, Drupal, and WordPress. Community members from all over the world, representing all those frameworks and more, got together for php[tek] 2023.
This was the 15th annual convention of PHP, where users shared knowledge and best practices for leveraging the language that came to define the internet over the last 28 years. There was a real sense of community at the event, summarized very succinctly in the day one keynote, "Let Go of Ownership," from Tim Lytle. He encouraged us to think about our code and the community as not things we own but instead, as things we are entrusted to take care of over time. He said we should think in terms of stewardship, which is a word that sums the subject up nicely.