First, the cat picture, as promised.

Ricky

Ian here. If you've seen my speaker bio in the last couple of years, I've mentioned being here in Austin with two cats. Ricky was one of the two; my post on phpc.social goes into a little more detail, and if you have a look you get another cat picture. I'm gonna miss him. As I write this Wednesday evening, this change happened less than 36 hours ago, so I'm in a...reflective mood.

But I'm sending this with the Longhorn PHP letterhead, to a Longhorn PHP list. So let's get back to that.

Looking back, and looking forward

This year is the seventh edition of Longhorn PHP. That matches the run of the Texas-based conference that inspired us, Lone Star PHP, which kicked off in 2011. Same purpose for both events...getting the PHP community together to hone our craft, make connections, and have some fun...just a different location.

While Lone Star's 7-year run was contiguous, ours hasn't been.

We skipped 2020 due to COVID, but were the first US-based PHP conference to come back thanks to the support of our current venue and a bit of luck (both from moving to a fall conference and having the event as the Delta variant of COVID was calming down in Austin). Other conferences weren't so lucky.

We skipped 2024 because I figured it made more sense, with Laracon in Texas that year, to have a community conference elsewhere in the US, in addition to PHP Tek, so CascadiaPHP happened that year. I'm using first-person pronouns here because if, in retrospect, we should've gone for the option that maintained continuity (having a Longhorn PHP 2024), that's on me.

Last year we came back, albeit to attendance that was down by about one-third from 2023 numbers (which were in turn down from our 2022 numbers). I'm happy we came back, bringing the PHP community to Austin again, but last year basically erased the financial buffer we had built over the years. We target breakeven (with volunteer staffing plus me playing credit card point games to cover some speaker flights) each year...last year we were nowhere near that largely because folks didn't show up. The close-in attendee tickets that we saw in years past didn't materialize.

Sponsorship was weaker as well but subsidizing our way out of weak sponsorship with a solid attendee base is both more sustainable and, well, just feels better. Maybe macroeconomic conditions were at fault. Maybe overlapping with LASCON 2025 was. Maybe skipping a year was. But we decided to give things another shot this year; as an organizing team, we believe community is more important than ever when it comes to developing software.

Fast-forward to this year. We have a few repeat sponsors who have trusted us, plus a couple new ones...and we've got a speaker lineup that I'm proud of in a format that allowed us to nudge ticket prices downward even as our costs have gone up. But ticket purchases are down again when our financial math really needs a 2023-sized conference to work...and, more importantly, you get a lot more out of an event like ours when more folks make it out.

Where does that leave us?

As it stands, assuming no significant wave of close-in tickets, we're taking this to mean that Longhorn PHP has served its purpose, and this year should be our last. Maybe that's the case; as I write this RailsConf is in town and, well, you can look up the opening keynote if you want a take from DHH. In which case we'll put on a memorable event for the speakers, sponsors, and attendees who have trusted us as part of the community, whether just this year or since 2018.

I don't want that to be the path we take though. I want Longhorn PHP, and community conferences like it, to continue to be a place where you can meet other folks building software and learn from them; as the pace of software building goes up the difference between quality software and code that collapses under its own weight has never been more stark, and in the age of throwing AI at things building software right still matters. As a single dev can build more, building the right things gets more important rather than less, and of the languages to write software in PHP is still a pretty solid one.

If you agree, this year is the time to show up; if this year's attendance shows that the community wants Longhorn PHP to continue to happen, we'll keep making it happen. Whether that means grabbing an in-person ticket for both days (and maybe hotel), purchasing a virtual ticket and tuning in on Friday the 16th, or just showing up Thursday evening for the AustinPHP meetup we'll have on-site, we want to see y'all.

And if you "don't do PHP anymore," check the schedule anyway; I think you'll find something on the schedule for you anyway, particularly on Friday.

If ticket prices are an issue, you can use the code 2026-september-flash-sale to get 20% off our current ticket prices (so, slightly above Early Bird prices) through Monday, September 28th. Feel free to broadcast this coupon code everywhere.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading this far, and if you've already grabbed a ticket thanks for participating in this corner of the community. I'll see you in...or from...Austin in just a few more weeks.

Ian Littman
Co-organizer, Longhorn PHP Conference