PHP-in-London list

While Twitter can be really annoying, sometimes it can help to promote some wonderfully simple ideas.

One of these came from Andrew Woods (@awoods) – a github repo called php-in-seattle.  It’s a simple idea – just a list of companies around a geographical area that use PHP.

What it can enable is of mutual advantage to the companies, and developers that might be looking for a new job. So, I started a similar list for the London (UK) area.

https://github.com/alister/php-in-london

PHP-In-London, (UK)

There are a lot of companies in London that use PHP, and it is hard to keep track. If you know of any PHP companies with offices in the (Greater) London area (within ~20 miles), add them with a quick pull request (you can also edit directly from within the Github website if you want).

I’ve also added another list for recruiters that deal with a lot of PHP roles – though as they are somewhat less technically savvy, there are only a couple of entries, one of which is a recruitment startup.

Starting the list actually helped to earn me a T-Shirt – for DigitalOcean Hacktober (which I’m actually wearing as I write this post :D).

To help spread the PR and Github Karma, when someone asked to add a new item to the list, I also added them as a full collaborator on the project – allowing them to add more – something that a some of them have already done – like these fine developers.

• Tristan Bailey, @tristanbailey
• Ross Motley, @rossmotley
• Scott (Fatbeehive) @scottfatbeehive
• kungfuchris, @kungfuchris
• Chris Padfield, @chrispadfield
• Richard George, @parsingphase
• Craig Willis, @craigwillis85

Awesome_Bot

As a developer, I know well that anything worth doing, is worth testing, so I looked around and realised that there was indeed a way to test the URLs that were in the list. It’s called ‘Awesome_Bot’, and it is mostly aimed at the various ‘Awesome ‘ lists that helped to inspire the list in the first place. Setting it up with Travis isn’t hard, and so I’ve also enabled that.

It has taken a little tweaking of the configuration (even this morning, when I added Travis-CI to the whitelist to allow for redirects of the SVG build status button), but it has also helped to catch a couple of problems.

HacktoberFest 2017? Don’t wait till then, though!

Although HacktoberFest 2017 hasn’t been announced yet, if it does happen, I’m aiming to plug the project more in early October – but that doesn’t mean you have to wait until then. If you work at a company based in London (or at least easily commutable), take a look, and throw me a pull request! If you’ve not used Git/Github before, then let me know, and I can walk you through what to do, or worst case, just drop me an email with the relevant details and I’ll add them myself on your behalf.

One final question for you:

I’m considering a wider UK list of companies that use PHP, probably broken down by region and then larger towns/cities. If you think it’s a good idea – let me know with a comment, and/or Thumbs-Up (or down) on the issue I’ve created for the idea.

Should I create a separate PHP-in-UK repo?