As a culmination of a very busy 2012/2013 ZgPHP meetup season and a two year anniversary of ZgPHP meetups we decided to organize a PHP conference , a first in South East Europe. With experience gathered organizing last years WebCamp Zagreb, our main goal was attracting regional speakers and attendees. Why? As our regular meetups are on Thursday evenings, speakers outside of Zagreb are hard to get by, while attendees living outside Zagreb don't have that much opportunity to meet fellow developers.

Saturday is a great day for having a conference, developers wanting to come are not limited by their company policies (yes not all web development companies have culture of sending their developers to eduction and/or conferences) while "avoiding" unmotivated people that would come just so they would not be at the office that day. Yes we know that this is not a perfect arrangement, but it is the best one in current circumstances.

When we started contacting speakers and opening call for papers, we hoped we will be able to get 5 or 6 of them interested, so we went with the name "ZgPHP mini conference". As time passed by, we got 8 speakers and were forced to dismiss few applicants as we had not enough time and resources to do more.

At first occurrence of conference and we already had 75% of our speakers we're not based out of Zagreb, had our first female speaker, a little over 100 attendees and 16 sponsors. Looking at the conference now, a month later, I must say that we have raised a bar high if we decide to organize such a conference again.

Though I can't be 100% objective, I loved it.

This was a team effort and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Luka Mužinić, Ivan Habunek and Ana Arbanas for organizing such a great event.