On the 7PHP.com site today there's a new community interview posted - this time with Corey Ballou, the co-organizer of the Queen City PHP user group (and upcoming Nomad PHP speaker). They talk some about his background, how he got involved in the community and some of his thoughts on PHP on general.

In this edition I talked with Corey Ballou who is the co-organizer of the Queen City PHP meetup group. @cballou has also been working as a developer with the cool mojoLive team. To be noted that Corey will be the speaker for the next, 3rd NomadPHP Online Talk this week and he will be presenting “Creating Realtime Applications with PHP and Websockets“. I now invite you to learn from his experience and get to know his personality.

They talk about Corey's early start with computers and how he evolved from things like VBScript and Perl up to PHP and other web technologies. He touches on some of the good and bad he sees about the language and some of his top advice to beginners. He also recommends some other resources and books to check out to gain even more knowledge. He finishes off the interview with a suggestion to all of those "on the sidelines" out there - get involved, speak and become a real proponent of the language!

There's a new post on 7PHP.com talking about a new giveaway they're doing in collaboration with the Nomad PHP (virtual) user group and giving away two tickets for the upcoming meeting.

NomadPHP is already on their 3rd edition and I’m hence also on my 3rd Ticket(s) give-away. [...] The topic of this 3rd talk will be centered around PHP and Websockets and will be presented by speaker Corey Ballou.

There's two ways to enter into the contest - either subscribe to their mailing list or Tweet about it (with the given tweet). The contest ends July 21st, so hurry and enter if you're interested. The Nomad PHP user group is "a (virtual) place to call home" if you don't have a user group in your area. It meets online once a month.