SymfonyLive Paris 2025: talks, community and 20 years of Symfony

On March 27 and 28, the French-speaking Symfony community gathered at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris for a particularly symbolic edition of SymfonyLive Paris. This year, we not only attended high-level conferences and shared some community time... but more importantly, we celebrated a great milestone: the 20th anniversary of Symfony 🎂

Workshops to get ready for the conference

Before the conference lights went up, SymfonyLive Paris 2025 kicked off with two days of workshops, held on 25 and 26 March at our premises in Asnières-sur-Seine.

As a training sponsor, we were delighted to host these practical sessions, which gave participants the opportunity to improve their skills and ask all their questions to recognised Symfony experts.

Here's an overview of this year's workshops:

• Mastering OOP and design patterns - Alexandre Salomé, to structure and optimize your code efficiently.

• Enhanced security and Webauthn with Symfony - Florent Morselli, to understand and implement modern authentication solutions.

• API development with API Platform - Kévin Dunglas, a deep dive into building robust, high-performance APIs.

• Symfony 7: The Fast Track - Nicolas Grekas, to harness the full power of Symfony 7.

• Approaching TDD with Symfony - Jules Pietri, an interactive workshop to better test your code and adopt an agile approach.

These workshops plunged attendees into the heart of the latest Symfony innovations, with actionable advice and fresh techniques to apply immediately in your projects.

If you missed it, no worries! SensioLabs offers Symfony and PHP training courses throughout the year to fit all levels! Check out our training courses

Inspiring conferences and leading speakers

SymfonyLive Paris 2025 officially began with an inspiring keynote from Fabien Potencier, the founder of Symfony, who shared his vision and the key developments of the framework. To make it easier to get started with the framework, Symfony now introduces 3 entry points:

• Symfony Hello, a very minimalist version of Symfony that installs Symfony very quickly in a single file, well suited for personal projects that need a simplified approach.

• Symfony Solo, a version of Symfony without the Flex component. The project can then be adapted and customized as desired, with progressive scalability options. Symfony Solo is the perfect way to start a Symfony project easily.

• Symfony Team, the full-stack approach to the framework, more oriented towards professional projects with a development team and long-term maintenance requirements. This is the current approach to Symfony.

These evolutions make it easier to adopt Symfony, even for small development projects, yet still benefit from all the advantages, scalability and power of Symfony.

Exciting technical sessions followed over the two days, covering topics as diverse as security, performance optimization, and major web development trends. Among the highlights, Florian Bogey proposed an innovative approach to roles and permissions management with Feature Flipping, while Grégoire Pineau immersed the audience in asynchronous architectures, exploring the use of Messenger, AMQP, and Mercure to improve application scalability.

Our SensioLabs experts were also on the spot to share their experiences:

• Simon André – "Symfony UX: Highlights from 2024 and Looking Ahead".

• Adrien Roches & Hubert Lenoir – "Lego components for a Gotenberg bundle!".

• Lightning talks – This year, Benjamin Georgeault, Imen Ezzine, and Mathieu Santostefano gave outstanding lightning talks on Dagger and the use of artificial intelligence tools with Symfony.

These two days of conferences offered attendees a full immersion into the latest progress in Symfony. They left the Cité Universitaire with a lot of new ideas to implement in their development projects. For a more detailed technical overview of the talks, read this article by Kévin Thérage from the SensioLabs Tech team on dev.to.

SensioLabs at the heart of the event

As a Diamond sponsor, we were present in the main Honnorat room, where our SensioLabs booth was the place to be. Developers, CTOs and enthusiasts came by our booth to chat with our team, talk about their technical challenges and learn more about what we offer and our services.

To make the experience even more fun and engaging, we have organized many activities:

🎮 SLU Platform Challenge - A challenge to test your speed and try to win a SymPony 🦄

🎟 Raffle contest - Organized by our recruitment team, to win a SymPony too.

⌨ Ztype - A game where the attendees had to type code blocks as fast as they can.

🍪 Gourmet break - On Thursday afternoon, we treated participants to pancakes and crêpes!

An original and fun way to unwind between two conferences!

The 20th anniversary of Symfony during the conference

This year, Symfony turns 20! Since it was created in 2005, the framework has seen some major changes, becoming one of the essential frameworks for modern development.

At SymfonyLive Paris 2025, we celebrated this milestone in a memorable way with collector stickers and exclusive hoodies in the colors of Symfony's 20th anniversary, offering attendees a souvenir of this special anniversary.

The hoodies made just for the event and sporting the anniversary logo were a huge hit with visitors, becoming the must-have item at the booth. There will be more hoodies at SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025.

If you want to know more about Symfony's 20th anniversary celebrations and the projects that marked this anniversary year, read our full article on the subject: Symfony's 20th anniversary. 🎂🎈

An immersive experience for our team

Aside from the conferences and networking, SymfonyLive Paris is also a great chance to strengthen the bonds between members of the SensioLabs team. As usual, we got a special goodie: SensioLabs tactile sports gloves, perfect for coding even in cold weather! 🧤

But the best part was definitely our team-building evening at DreamAway. We got to try out some super cool virtual reality adventures. We tried Ragnaröck 🎵, a boat race set to metal music where we had to paddle in rhythm. Then there was Propagation VR 🎯, an immersive mission requiring cooperation and strategy to survive against zombies. We also did Aqualia 💎, an underwater treasure hunt testing our coordination and spirit of exploration. Each challenge pushed us out of our comfort zone, strengthened our team spirit and above all... had a lot of fun! 😄

See you at the upcoming events

A huge thanks to all the speakers, sponsors and participants who made this edition of SymfonyLive Paris 2025 such a success. Once again this year, the Symfony community has shown how vibrant and passionate it is about innovation.

And it's not over yet! We are already looking forward to seeing you at our next Symfony events:

• SymfonyOnline June 2025 – A 100% online edition.

• SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025 – The flagship end-of-year event in Amsterdam 🌷