I am going to try and write this article without doing a lot of back-and-forth and editing. TrueNorth PHP was a PHP-centric developer conference that Pete Meth and myself ran from 2012-2016. Five events. Awesome speakers. Even more awesome attendees.

For me this was the golden age of PHP conferences.

Any mistakes in here are mine and mine alone -- a lot the background stuff happened 13 or 14 years ago. Sometimes I cannot remember what I had for breakfast.

"I want to do a conference"

Ironically it wasn't me who first made this suggestion. One of our GTA area developers who used to come out to the GTA PHP User Group mentioned to me that he wanted to do a travelling conference -- going from location to location here in Ontario.

While I liked the idea of another event I didn't want to have it be a travelling one -- mainly because it was unlikely I could get the necessary time off to go to all those locations!

So, I talked to Pete (who was helping me run the user group at the time) and he was in.

"Can I get some advice?"

My next move was to talk to Marco Tabini (who helped start php|architect and ran a conference for many years) to get some high-level advice. We met for coffee somewhere north of Toronto. As I remember, here is what he said:

• keep it small
• find a date nobody else is using
• getting sponsors will be the hardest part

All great advice. So I decided November was good (venues tended to be cheaper) and that the best way to split things up was for me to be the hype man and speaker handler while Pete handled everything else.

"Everything went so well!"

We definitely lucked into have Microsoft Canada's offices not far from the Toronto airport being a perfect venue:

• three rooms
• great A/V support
• on-site catering

I can honestly say that we did not have any major problems at any of the five events we ran. From my years of being on the speaking circuit I had no shortage of friends I could ask to come speak along with always getting a large number of quality submissions every time.

I don't think it could've gone any better.

Running a conference is hard. Ask any organizer. For one to go so well is astonishing. We could've kept doing it for a long long time.

I treated the speakers the way I wanted to be treated by events. The staff at the venue were incredibly supportive.

Five years of a great event that people started lamenting they couldn't make it to was awesome

"I think we should do this one last time"

After each event Pete and I would have dinner the next day and talk about how it went. Each time we did it, there were less and less unexpected things. I said to him after the 4th one -- "are you getting bored of doing this?" He replied that he was so we agreed that we would do it one last time.

"Pete, we did it!"

I always did the closing talk of the event and when it came for my last time, it was emotional. I reflected on what we had accomplished with just two organizers and a lot of enthusiastic volunteers.

Pete and I drifted apart without the common event to unite us but we did stay in touch and on those occasions we were together it felt like no time had passed.

Thank You

If you attended any of these events -- thank you for supporting an idea that got turned into reality.

If you spoke at any of these events -- thank you for taking the time to hang out with me and make the lives of the attendees a little better.

If you missed out -- I don't know what to tell you other than I'm sorry it didn't work out for you.