With the coming of October, what's become an annual event has started back up to encourage contributions to Open Source projects: Hacktoberfest. This is a joint venture between Digital Ocean, GitHub, and Twilio. If you make the contributions, you'll receive a special limited edition Hacktoberfest t-shirt

[Here's the rules:] To get a shirt, you must make five pull requests (PRs) between October 1–31 in any timezone. PRs can be to any public repo on GitHub, not just the ones highlighted. The PR must contain commits you made yourself. PRs reported by maintainers as spam or that are automated will be marked as invalid and won't count towards the shirt. This year, the first 50,000 of you can earn a T-shirt (compared with 30,000 in 2017).

The guiding principles of the event are to encourage everyone to contribute (make them feel welcome) and to shoot for quality, not quantity. If you're not sure where to start, check out the main page for the event near the bottom of the page for a listing of projects with open Hacktoberfest issues.

The Zend Developer Zone site has posted an reminder about the Call for Papers for ZendCon 2017 happening October 23rd through 26th in Las Vegas, Nevada.

For the five of you who are living under a rock and haven’t heard, the dates for ZendCon 2017 have been announced and the ZendCon 2017 Call for Papers is open. [...] Join us in Vegas this October and be a part of one of the largest gatherings of the PHP community. Submit your talk to ZendCon 2017 today. (Submit at least 2 more tomorrow too!)

The post also shares a summary of the speaker's package provided for those selected to present at the event including a full conference pass, round-trip airfare and two hotel nights. The Call for Papers ends on April 14th - just one week from today - so get over there and submit those presentation ideas before time runs out!

On the Symfony blog there's an announcement about the return of SymfonyLive San Francisco, coming back after the unfortunate cancelation of SymfonyLive Chicago. SymfonyLive San Francisco will be October 19th and 20th at the Crunchyroll offices.

SymfonyLive is coming back, that’s right, back to our beloved San Francisco for a whole new chapter in our conference series for 2017 and we just had to share the news with you right away!

As some of you may remember, last year’s SymfonyLive Chicago was cancelled and we were pretty disappointed. But we didn’t let it get us down and in 2017 we’re coming back even stronger and setting up shop again!

We’re going to need your help to make this conference a huge success, so please SAVE THE DATE in next year’s calendar and, write in SymfonyLive San Francisco 2017 October 19th-20th!

The actual event will span from October 17th through 20th but the first two days of that will be training sessions, not regular conference talks. The website for the event isn't up yet but more information about the event will be coming soon including the opening of their Call for Papers. Keep an eye on the Symfony blog for more details as they are released.

The Atlanta PHP User Group has announced their October meetup with a presentation from Jacob Terry about tracking in your application.

Even if your users don’t want a full “audit trail” of activity, even if you aren’t interested in doing a newsfeed, recording user actions in your application can be enormously useful. We’ll look at a real-world implementation of recording that data, using a CodeIgniter-based application, and discuss three less-obvious use cases. Those are: Undo, Sync & Emails.

The meeting is going to be on Thursday, October 4th from 7-9pm at the Strongbox West coworking facility. If you're in the Atlanta area, you should definitely check this group out!

In a new post to his blog today Philip Norton has made his announcement about this year's PHP North West Conference 2011 happening October 7th through 9th in Manchester, UK.

I have attended the last 3 PHPNW conferences and they have all been of a very high standard in virtually every way. [...] The conference will be split over two days on the 8th and 9th of October with 3 full tracks on the Saturday and 2 tracks on the Sunday. There will also be lots of coffee breaks and there is usually a free bar in the evening of the Saturday.

Tickets aren't on sale yet for the event, but it shouldn't be too long before the Early Bird pricing is announced. Potential sponsors can find more information here and you can keep up with the latest by following @phpnw11 on Twitter.

A new PHP conference has been announed for those in and around the Washington, DC area - the 2006 DC PHP Conference happening October 18-20th. It's overarching theme will be "PHP In The Federal Enterprise and the World".

The conference also has their Call for Papers open through the 7th of July. The session tracks your presentation would need to fit into are:

• Integrating PHP with the Federal Operations and the Enterprise
• Security & Accountability
• The Art of PHP
• The Business Case For PHP

The sessions need to be about 45-50 minutes with a Q&A to follow, and one speaker per track will be chosen to recieve compensation for air and hotel during the stay. To submit you paper online, head on over to their submission form now!

A new PHP conference has been announed for those in and around the Washington, DC area - the 2006 DC PHP Conference happening October 18-20th. It's overarching theme will be "PHP In The Federal Enterprise and the World".

The conference also has their Call for Papers open through the 7th of July. The session tracks your presentation would need to fit into are:

• Integrating PHP with the Federal Operations and the Enterprise
• Security & Accountability
• The Art of PHP
• The Business Case For PHP

The sessions need to be about 45-50 minutes with a Q&A to follow, and one speaker per track will be chosen to recieve compensation for air and hotel during the stay. To submit you paper online, head on over to their submission form now!