In 2017, I attended one of my first PHP barcamps as a frontend developer and left with an elephpant that had been given out as a prize for the best talk on day one. PHP wasn't listed on my CV, and no one ever asked me to give a reason for being there. That warm welcome is the reason why I stuck around and am now in every community to which I belong. The one elephpant has grown into a herd of thirty since, and my love for communities grew with it.

Yet in 2020, the rooms were closed the first time. A number of those communities returned afterward, and the ones that did had become smaller. A little later, the programs that had helped increase the herd also ended: Women Who Code ceased to exist in April 2024 and Google moved Women Techmakers out of the company in October 2025. All of it while AI changes how we learn and how we get hired, and meetups such as open source are scrambling for funds.

So this talk is about what community means to me nowadays and how that has changed over the years: what remains when the rooms and the programs both go quiet, and where to look for it. Most of my thirty elephpants arrived after 2020, after all: The herd still exists, we are still here, and we still have each other's backs. ❤️