The Tumblr Engineering blog has a new post with details about how they made the switch to PHP 7 in their previously PHP 5 codebase (and some of the things they learned along the way).

At Tumblr, we’re always looking for new ways to improve the performance of the site. This means things like adding caching to heavily used codepaths, testing out new CDN configurations, or upgrading underlying software.

Recently, in a cross-team effort, we upgraded our full web server fleet from PHP 5 to PHP 7. The whole upgrade was a fun project with some very cool results, so we wanted to share it with you.

They start off with the timeline of events, starting with the original hackday project out through the final PHP 7 deployment in production less than a year later. They cover some of the testing methods they employed during the transition and the impact of the update on their application on request latency, CPU load and memory usage. They wrap up the post talking about some of the PHP 7-specific things they made use of in their update including anonymous functions and scalar type hinting.

On the Symfony Blog they've posted the official announcement of their Fourth Symfony Docs Hack Day happening on May 21st. This hack day is focused on just improving the documentation for the framework, not handling bugs in the main codebase itself.

The Symfony project is proud to announce its fourth Symfony Docs Hack Day. This Hack Day will be an online event to give a push to the Symfony Docs before the Symfony 3.1 release at the end of this month.

[...] Hosts Ryan Weaver, Wouter de Jong and Christian Flothmann along with you and all your friends from the Symfony community. The Hack Day is for everyone - we need Symfony experts and newcomers. If you're new to Symfony, you give us a fresh look at the documentation!

The post gives you a bit of an idea what the event will be like and what you can expect, especially as a first time submitter. It will be happening completely online via the "#symfony-docs" channel on the Freenode IRC network. You can prepare by following some of the links in the post to pending pull requests and a list of missing documentation contents.

On the Symfony blog they've officially announce their latest virtual Symfony Hack Day coming in March (on the 12th). This event is a concentrated effort from the project and developers to come together and solve issues over several hours.

Symfony has always been a project driven by a huge and active community. [...] Because Symfony has a predictable release schedule, we know that feature freeze for Symfony 3.1 will be at the end of this month (March). That makes the next few weeks of development really important!

That's why we've decided to organize an online hack day, and I would love if you'd join us. If you're an experienced contributor, great! If you're new, even better! This hack day will focus on teaching you how to contribute.

The event will be happening March 12th from 3pm to 8pm CET / 9am to 2pm EST and will focus around the #symfony-dev channel on the Freenode IRC network. They'll be focusing on how to get started contributing to the framework including a mini-workshop showing how to triage issues to creating a pull request.

On the Symfony blog today Ryan Weaver has posted a note about the first ever Symfony online community hack day coming up on July the 5th.

Last week, I talked about the Symfony Experience, and announced a new Developer Experience Initiative. [...] And now it's time to put our ideas into action, with the first community hack day on July 5th. This hack day is for everyone and we'll focus on tasks from all around the Symfony world: the core code and third party bundles. This is our chance to really push on things that never quite get done as well as they could: third party bundle documentation, exception messages, shortcuts, etc.

The event will be happening on July 5th from 9am to 8pm Central European Time (3am to 2pm Eastern time in the US) and will be run from the #symfony channel on the Freenode IRC network. There'll be plenty to do, so if you're interested in getting involved, reach out to Ryan or Javier once you're on and they can point you in the right direction. More information can be found on the Symfony blog.

On the Symfony Blog today there's a new post talking about Symfony Live Berlin coming up next month (November 7th and 8th) with a free hack day following.

This year has already seen a few successful Symfony Live conferences in Paris, Portland, and London. But we got one more - Symfony Live Berlin is approaching fast! From November 7th to 8th, there will be again talks and workshops in Germany's capital city. Additionally, we will host a free hack day on Saturday, November 9th. We will return to last year's location, the Umweltforum Berlin - an over 100 year old church!

They talk about what's different than past years - dedicated language sessions, offering the Symfony certification exam and the previously mentioned hack day following the main event. You can see the full schedule for the event here or just pick up some last minute tickets if you'd like to attend.

On the Symfony blog there's a post from Ryan Weaver about an upcoming event the project is hosting and how you can help - the Symfony Docs Hack Day (on March 30th).

The first commit to the Symfony documentation was over 3 years ago, and since then, we've grown to include a full book, lots of cookbook entries, and sections for most of the individual components. [...] But as we grow, we want to stay aggressive and continue to improve the quality of the docs. This means ensuring that code examples are accurate and pages are easy to understand, balancing the info you need with excess technical clutter. [...] And this is where we need your help! Whether you're a seasoned-Symfony veteran, a beginner, or even if you don't think your English is very good, we'd like you to join us on March 30th for our first ever Symfony Docs Hack Day.

The event is a virtual one - everyone will meet up on the Freenode IRC network in the #symfony-docs channel on March 30th from 9am through 5pm Central EU time. Everyone's invited, not just those who are experts in the framework. Documentation updates are a great way to learn more about a framework too! If you're interested in what kind of updates they're looking for, check out this list of open issues with the docs on Github.