Since 2009, SensioLabs has been organizing annual events to bring the PHP community together around the famous Symfony framework. The acquisition of the company by the Smile group in 2021 provides additional support to promote and organize these events, with the main ones being SymfonyLive and SymfonyCon.
In addition to actively supporting SensioLabs in the development and promotion of Symfony, Smile encourages its employees to train and position themselves as experts in the framework. The goal is to offer its clients the best possible support in their digital transformation.
Our colleague, Valentin Salmeron, a development engineer and Symfony expert, attended the event to deepen his knowledge and offer the best technical solutions tailored to our clients' projects.
An annual gathering for framework experts
This year, the Cité Universitaire of Paris once again hosted SymfonyLive. This event, regularly held in various countries, brings together developers who use the Symfony framework—both beginners and experts. Two full days are dedicated to conferences presented by members of SensioLabs, as well as their partners and companies that actively support Symfony, such as Les-Tilleuls.coop, Codéine (to name just a few).
The talks cover a wide range of topics related to the framework: new features, the latest updates, real-world feedback, practical applications, and more. The breaks between sessions give developers the opportunity to meet and exchange knowledge and experiences. Partner booths help create a friendly and dynamic atmosphere, offering interactive workshops and showcasing their latest news.
Ahead of the conference days, SensioLabs also offered training sessions on various topics. These included TDD methodology, implementing security in a Symfony application, and the Symfony 7 Fast Track, presented by Nicolas Grekas, a member of the Symfony core team and one of its main contributors.
© SymfonyLive Paris 2025
Feedback from Valentin Salmeron, Software Engineer at Smile Switzerland
Passionate about web development from a young age, Valentin Salmeron discovered Symfony during his studies in Lyon. He joined the Smile group in 2020, then moved to the Smile Switzerland agency in 2022. After working on several projects where he applied his knowledge and skills in PHP, Symfony, and Laravel, it was only natural for him to attend SymfonyLive Paris 2025.
He shares his first impressions of the event with us:
After several years at a human-sized agency like Smile Switzerland, it was quite impressive to be back in the midst of the crowd formed by the PHP and Symfony developer community. But it was especially inspiring: being able to compare my experience with Symfony users from all backgrounds allowed me to reconsider my own understanding of the framework and motivates me to improve.
In addition to the conferences, Valentin chose to attend the “Enhanced Security and Webauthn with Symfony” training, offered by Florent Morselli, and the “API Development with API Platform” training, offered by Antoine Bluchet and Kévin Dunglas. He explains his choices:
The training on implementing security was an obvious choice. In an era where security is one of the most critical issues, it was essential for me to learn more about best practices in web security and how to implement them with Symfony. Like many others in the training, the presentation of the WebAuthn standard, which enables the use of new authentication methods like biometric fingerprinting or access keys, opens up new possibilities for both existing and future projects.
On the second day, I had a complete introduction to API Platform, to build robust APIs that follow the latest web standards. I had heard of it before, but had never had the chance to integrate it into my projects. Furthermore, several talks during the event focused on API Platform. This training helped me better prepare for the talks and taught me a lot about API Platform, thanks to the trainers, who were none other than the creators and maintainers of this tool!
Finally, he reflects on the entire SymfonyLive Paris event and what it brought him:
For my first participation, this SymfonyLive event has been incredibly rewarding. Of course, I gained knowledge, but also had enriching encounters within the community. After these intense four days, I’m eager to share what I’ve learned with my colleagues at Smile Switzerland, so that together, we can build and offer better web experiences and solutions for our clients.
Symfony: a key technology in our projects
The Smile Switzerland agency aims to offer better solutions to its clients using Symfony, a framework that provides new possibilities every year and adapts to emerging technologies like AI. This is achieved through training its employees, engaging with the developer community, and recruiting new talent.
With many resources shared by the community and by SensioLabs, such as the whitepaper “Why Symfony?” written by Nicolas Grekas, Symfony is an ideal choice to support our clients in their digital transformation, whether it's evolving existing solutions or building new ones.
So don’t wait any longer, and contact us to be supported with Symfony!