Even My Mom Knows About Symfony

I was chatting with my mom on Facebook the other day (yes, she's on Facebook) and I noticed that my status message had not been updated in a while. I thought briefly about what to change it to, and, since I have been spending a good deal of my time lately learning Symfony via their very informative Jobeet tutorial, I changed it to: "Steven is learning Symfony."

My mom saw that I had changed my status message and commented, "Why are you learning Symfony?"

I told her that I had gotten involved in a project that was using it and that I would be able to use it for some other projects in the future, if I liked it (which I do). Then I explained to her that Symfony is a PHP framework. What came next was the part that surprised me.

She said, "Yeah, I've heard of Symfony."

"Really?" I said, with my mouth agape (fortunately she couldn't see me -- we were chatting on Facebook, remember).

"Yeah," she said, "I think I heard about it from Brad or something."

At this point I probably owe the reader a little background. My mom used to have a position supporting a database at a University and rubbed shoulders with programmers quite frequently (Brad was her boss who also happened to be a programmer). She also took a PHP class once upon a time, but I know she did not learn about Symfony from that class (I was in the class).

Despite my mother's more-colorful-than-average technical background, I think it is still quite impressive that she knows about an open source, web application framework that even I have not known about for very long. So, I will leave it up to the reader to decide: either my mom is exceptionally cool or Symfony is becoming a household name. When I put it like that, I am inclined to choose the former, but I still see this experience as an indicator that open source software is starting to make its mark on the world (love you Mom).