Thank you. And to Scott, you're going to, we're going to hit my favorite subject anyway.

Yeah. So if you use my, yeah, this is the grandfather of the one you just showed me. Okay. If you check on your own, you should probably have the site with the PHP in black, right?

So this is part of the initial design. And this one is the first one because at some point in the world, there was a moment in the world, there was one Elephant that was this one. We actually sent them a blueprint. And obviously blueprint means that it's blue. So they missed the lettering. And this is how you recognize this is Trisaïeul. So this is the first Elephant ever. Still there. I could still use it for— it still codes a little bit PHP 4, so be careful. But otherwise, you know, it's well aligned. So the elephant, it's a long story. It starts— well, technically it can start with the Big Bang, but usually I make it just start like last millennium. I think that should be sufficient, right? We have time to cover from last millennium to now in a short amount of time.

So it started with the logo itself because usually people ask about the logo. and where the elephant, the shape of the elephant starts. And it's literally the fact that the PHP logo at the time, and still here, the official logo is the PHP letters inside an ellipse, something like that. And by the end of last century, so Vincent Pontier was a designer. I don't think he'd mind if I don't say he's a developer, but he was more a graphist than a developer. And he was looking and doodling with the letters, and then he realized that the P here is going to look like the head of the elephant. So you see a trump and you see the ear, and the other P acts as a butt of the elephant. So I guess you don't need to be that much of a graphist to just turn the H in the middle into a— but don't tell him that because— anyway, he actually started with that and just morphed basically the letters into something that was an animal. And this is how we started with the logo itself. You've seen it on a regular basis. There's a few of them at PHP Tech. The elephant that says, you know, that took one side and which has the letters on the side, because otherwise you don't recognize it. And it got that, it went viral. I mean, every PHP developer user group had diverse variations of the elephants like that, either raw from Vincent, either modified, but there was an elephant somewhere, so the elephant coat. And then at the same time, I was starting my career as a speaker. And as I went around, we had the tux elephant, the tux penguin from Linux, which was representing the penguin from the mascot of Linux. And it was a plush, so a plush toy. So I decided to start bugging people around saying, okay, you know what? Let's turn that logo into an actual plush toy. And I got a lot of positive feedback. People were very interested. If I remember well, there was, at that time, I would mass mail people, you know, literally from the server and send them text mails. And I sent something to a user group in New Zealand. I never met the guy, but the message that he sent me back was like, hey, I've never fallen for spammy, but this one looks spammy. In the same time, I want to believe. Tell me you're real. And then I explained him, yeah, okay, I'm going to do this plush toy elephant. Do you want to buy a box of 50? And he said, yes, no problem, count me in. And then, you know, 6 months later, I would send a box of elephants to New Zealand. It's like, whoever thought, right?

So it started like that. And then from there, there was, well, the story of the birth of the elephants. We started with one guy, then I got 6,000 of them, 6,054. of them in my home. Now, I would suggest that if you want to test the strength of your wedding vows, that's a good test. Well, my wife is still here. Well, not tonight. I managed to send her away on a piano lesson because I need to put the elephant outside. But she stayed. So again, that's an achievement. We got the elephant and then it started with the generic one. It was for everyone. And then companies and events tried to get a specific version of them. So we've got elephants for user groups. I would think, for example, the user group of Amsterdam, they made a black one with the XX on it, the logo, the local logo. PHP Tech has a number of them.

Yeah, user group, you see Japan. Oh, it's PHPCon. Anyway, this is not the user group. PHP Tech, it's not even the most recent one. It's an older one because, you know, I usually play conference snob and I don't bring the elephant of the year. I bring an older one. It's like, hey, where did you get that? Oh yeah, a few years ago.

So they got, you know, lots of variations. I think at the moment we've got, we are reaching like like 80 of them, every, you know, 80 different variations. Some were companies or events that had several of them and different per year. So for a while, the Zen Conference would do a different generation every year. I would say again, PHP Tech is doing that nowadays, like every year, new conference, new elephants.

But also some companies had several versions and they are now part of the community. So Pretty quickly, I would say the spread of the elephant started with the fact that we had the blue one, and for some reason, which is probably confusing lots of people in the world, babies, I mean, baby boys get a blue elephant, and then we needed a pink one for girls, which is a standard that is highly cultural. So it works kind of well in the West, not much outside. People don't understand why we have those colors. But anyway, we had the blue ones, we had also the pink one, and there's 2 generations of them. That's actually one of them. And then of course, all the declinations. So people try to have all of the 5 of them and then the 6 of them and then the 12 of them and then the 25 and stuff like that. So there's a world trading which actually brings people together. Literally, what, that last message I asked for trade was 2 days ago. 2 days ago, someone said, hey, look, I've got this elephant. I've noted you don't have it. Can we share? I'm looking for these and these and these. And so we are trying to see which one we want to exchange. And then the next question is going to be, how are we going to meet?

And that's the point. So I mean, of course we can go the easy way and stuff the elephant in a box. They're surprisingly in a good size because if you go to many things, there's easy boxes just exactly fit for the elephant. So that's like, I don't know how we did that, but that was a good result. But I can ship it. It's easy, not to every country, but it's easy and it's way too easy. So what we do is that we go with a concept called the CPS, the community postal service. And by community postal service, the concept is that we'll find someone, someones sometimes, several people that will actually relay, I mean, take the elephant from one guy and give it to another one until we have a full exchange. So it may take a long time. I've got elephants that have been sleeping somewhere in my cupboard several years before I actually either gave up or actually met whoever wanted the elephant and do the exchange. But at the same time, it's fun. So you have to either discover places or you have to say, yeah, I'm going to this conference. Oh no, I'm going to miss that, this one this year. What about we meet there? And it's like, wow, you've got a whole plan around, you know, just sharing the elephant. And that gives you lots of very interesting stories like that.

So you're, yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So I've got long stories. One of them started, it's still a running gag with my wife at the moment, but it has a nice epilogue. It started with buying PHP Arch Elephant Archie, an old, I think the green, the orange one. I don't know exactly if this is this version or another, but you know, and that and a bunch of red ones from California. Now the thing is from there, okay, of course, The shipping was horrendous. It was like, I don't know, €60 to send that across half the Earth also. So you have to consider that. So what we actually did is that it was shipped from California to Seattle. In Seattle, it was collected by a local member who actually flew to Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, I was waiting for him at the airport and I collected my box of elephants. It was good because there was like 50 of them. So that was a significant Of course, I collected mine. I shipped a few. I gave a few of them by going to meetups in Netherlands. So that was good. The bulk of them, I would say 25 of them, were to be given to Dutch, the German guys. I don't go too often Germany. It's not far, but it's not on my road. No problem. So we actually managed to connect with a Belgium guy, which is just south of the Netherlands. And we decided that, yeah, I can actually drop the whole lot to him and then he will find a way to go to Germany because he has relatives there. That's your family, right?

That's a moment where you go to Christmas and you're going to spread elephants. The problem was that, well, I don't have a car, so carrying 25 elephants to Belgium, still a whole. So I actually waited for a wedding opportunity in my side of the family. which was in France. So I had to rent a car and to drive through Belgium. And then I decided that, yeah, it's the moment to meet Bart and give him the elephant. And then my wife looked at me and said, hold on, there's 7 hours of driving to the wedding. We are not going to make a detour to drop elephants. Yeah, but I'm a resourceful guy. So I looked at her and said, yeah, you know what? What we can do for the wedding is that we could stop at a chocolate factory in Brussels. And she looked at me suspiciously and And she said, hmm, why does that sound like a trap? I said, no, no, it's a factory and you can actually taste everything you want. And she said, okay, why not? We go there, we grab the chocolate for the wedding. Fine. So we went there and you know what happened when we were in the parking of the chocolate factory? Well, Bart was there so I could give him the elephant.

So that went well because actually there she could actually taste all the chocolates. So she literally went into to the shop and ate her heart out.

And on the outside, we were on a parking lot with Bart together. We parked next to each other because it was easy to spot one another. It was gray. It was an industrial zone. So that was really not glamorous. And then we decided to play it mafioso style. So we went to each other. It's like, you've got the money? You've got the stuff? There, look at that. Okay, show me the mother. And so that's the whole thing. It was complex to organize. I need to, you know, go to the airport, then drive, drive to Belgium. I met along the way Tim on the way in, then Bart, and then everyone knows that story now.

We still go again to that chocolate factory. That's the happy epilogue. My wife is happy to know that address now. We don't do any, any elephant anymore. We just go for the chocolate. But I have to admit that she also, you know, go in and usually take a look and see if there is no one waiting for us. So that's what I like. That's what I like. I probably didn't have any other opportunity to meet Bart another way, but now we've got this special connection together.

Well, I usually, well, if you, when you want to do that, although I'm pretty sure you do have some experience already, but there's a long process which usually starts with me asking you, what is the value you want to put to your elephants? Now, a classic thing is usually people go with collections or they go with the notion of buying the elephants. And I say, no, no, no, it's not a collection, it's a family of elephants. It's a family if you want to do it full. And you don't buy an elephant, you adopt it. So that's the first thing. And indeed, when you go around, every elephant has a story, and that's the important thing that's behind. So if you know why you want to do an elephant, then you're going to be able to share that value with your community. That might be, for example, well, we've seen companies that comes with the logo usually. We've seen user groups or events. Hey, I was there 2016. Well, I didn't go to Japan, to be honest. I was lucky enough to have the head of the conference bring it to me in Amsterdam. This is it. And I want to share, for example, the story of this one. Okay? So first, it's a special color. It's different from the others. And then the company was sponsoring it. Well, it was probably mostly the IT department that was driving that, but it was also made for company-wide present. Okay? When I arrived with the prototype, I gave it to the partners, the partner manager, And the partner manager looked at me and said, oh yeah, excellent. We've got an elephant like that with the name of the company. Perfect. We're going to do that. And then he switched and then he looked at that side. And I remember seeing his face shut down. It's like, PHP, what the hell is that? Okay. That's the technology we are, you know, using to power the website and the application. But well, you're the partner guy. You don't really care. It just works. So that's what you want. But then I've seen him start smiling again. He said, hey, you know what, PHP, partner helping partners, that works for me too. Make me 2 box. And that was the value. You know, they wanted to promote the company. It was a company that was working also with a lot of hotels. So we could actually ship those elephants to the customers and say, okay, you know what, take a picture of the elephant with our company at the place where you are and send us a picture of that. So it was a very easy campaign to do. to show that we've got customers all over the world and be able to have a photo album of the elephant traveling around the world. And everyone was very happy to hear about the company, about the technology, about everything. So that's really the main selling point. You start with that, you need the value. Why do you want to use an elephant and how are you going to share it? And that's a good— that's an important thing. After that, you've got to choose different colors. So that's going to be easy on this one. We always ask for the left side of the elephant to be PHP only. There's a few exceptions, but most of the time, if you look at that, this is the PHP logo, okay, beside the colors. Then usually you choose the, well, the fur itself. You choose the color of the nails. So I'm going to show here, it's very obvious in red. And then you can you can do whatever you want on the other side, mostly. After that, you can be creative. So I've mentioned already on this one, you see the colors are very different. You've seen on this one also, the colors at the bottom of the powers are different. Or you can go with something that I enjoy a lot, which are accessories. So for example, you take an elephant and then you realize that this is the good size for dolls. Not, I would say, the smaller doll, something a bit more collector's thing, but you can actually find people who actually do accessories for dolls and grab stuff for them. So here we've got a wizard hat for a company that wanted to play on the fact that they were time masters, so time wizards. So we wanted a We wanted to have a special one. And this is, I don't know the material in English, but it looks like a Harry Potter, you know, kind of a hat and it fits exactly on it. Now, if you want to be a bit more American, I got, and again, that's a gift.

Yeah, it's a cowboy hat. It's from Texas. Dana Luthers gave it to me. Again, this is pure luck. This fits.

And that's it. You've got your elephant. You, you, you could use a, a standard elephant, put this extra detail, and there you are.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So you, you can do little things like that. Um, when you look at the, at this elephant, you know, immediately it's a PHP elephant. And then by paying a bit of attention, you realize there are things that are slightly different. Maybe the German company you were referring to, they had, it was an ink and paper company. So they had the elephants, but the nails were a drop of ink and a slab of paper, things like that.

It doesn't have to be very different, but with little, a little bit of imagination, you can turn something that is both very standard and at the same time say, Hey, look, I know what it is. It's orange. Oh yeah, it's a Dutch elephant. Oh no, it's not Dutch. Anyway, the color is important, the logos and things like that. From there, basically, you have your prototype. You can actually start teasing people about it. And that's an important phase in the life of the elephant. People want to know if there is a new elephant. So there are usually lots of them, of us monitoring and seeing a new version of the elephant. And when it actually arrives, it's not, again, it's not a shipping shipment of elephant, it's a delivery. And I like it because in English, the delivery is the same for getting crates of product, but also a delivery of a baby, right? And this is it. This is what I want. It's a family. So we've got a new generation. It's a delivery. We've got a new generation of elephants. Of course, whoever is receiving them has to publicize it this way. So again, it's an event, it's a company. They usually have some special version or something like that. And then I always suggest that you keep about 100 of them for people who want to grow their Because there's always, always people who will not be able to attend your place. Maybe it's in Europe, it's too far for you, but then you can still ship an elephant. It's 100 grams basically, so it's pretty standard. We've seen the boxes, even for shipping, it's very standard. And then you can get one, and then you suddenly have lots of friends, companies all across the world that are actually using PHP.

For yourself?

I can actually tell you about a little bit of a project for me because one of the things that I pay attention to is that a generation of elephant is at least 300 of them. Now, I'm not a good example because I started with 6,000 of them. Okay? So that's 20 times that. But if you buy 300 of them, there are people who have large amounts of them at home and they don't know what to do with that. Pay attention to that. I mean, of course you may have, and I hope for you, you have more than 300 friends, but it's still something to handle, right?

So one of the things we want to push is an elephant. It's a concept and we call it Scratchy. And as usual, you can see it doesn't show, right? What you can see is that if you go on the other side, there is something special. First, it's a PHP 9 elephant. As you can see, I'm a bit ahead of time. I've been begging the PHP group to release PHP 9 so we can actually have a PHP 9 elephant generation, and I get some stupid feedback saying, yeah, an elephant is not a reason to have a bump of version. You see, that makes you smile. This is stupid, right? I don't know. It's not the question that is stupid, but anyway, so we have that. And the concept is that for smaller quantities, there's a scratch there, a scratch pad, so I can actually switch it. And since we're not on PHP 9, so this is too early, I can switch back and put it back to PHP 8.5. That's a cool idea, The idea being that if you've got a small user group, and by small, I mean less than 300 people in your user group, which is usually the case, and you don't want to fork out the amount of money and the risk that's related to making a world generation, then you could probably get things like that, which are, I would say, something like $1 to $3 if you want to make them really You know, posh and expensive, you can find more. But this part is pretty simple and it does retain this collector behavior, meaning that at home you can have this Elephant as a support. Okay. You just have it basically naked. And I will send you my Elephant with, hop, ExaCat. I've of course done one for myself. And then you're going to send me your Scott patch.

And I will, yeah. And then if I go around and I go to a conference or a meetup, then I can also, you know, go around with only my patches and make a, you know, share, give them because, you know, $3, $4, $5, yeah, it may be a gift. If it's $20, it's a bit of a harder one.

It's a concept. Yeah, it's a concept. Um, so far I just have the prototype.

Well, beside Elephants, I also do static analysis. So yeah, I'm using— I'm still developing Exacat, the static analysis engine for PHP. And the other things I've taken on, and I'm looking for actually feedback, so people could be interested, I'm doing a PHP onboarding book that would help newcomers to adopt PHP and decide to learn it, which is something a bit missing at the moment in terms of manual. We've got the reference release, bit less of something that will help you get started. So if you're interested or if you're new to PHP, I'm doing PHP onboarding. I've got a link I can share with you to draw people and have feedback on how it's helping, you know, get started.

So good. I'll do that.

Thank you very much for your invitation.

And I can, maybe I can fit a whole family pictures. Oh, I, uh, I'm going to finish with this one.

It's a Lego one.

And you can, you can actually fit stuff in it because it's a, it's a, it's a Lego one. It's a box.