What I'm looking forward to at next weeks PHP UK Conference

PHP UK Conference is next week, I went last year, had an amazing time and learn’t a lot the main takeaway’s was upgrading all my servers to PHP 5.6 and to use PSR (PHP Standard Recommendations) before then I wasn’t using or even really knew what PSR was! I work in a ultra small team, since then I’ve tried to keep up to date.

I’m wondering what workflow changing nuggets I’ll discover, the conference is only for 2 days but there is a lot of amazing talks to attend, as with last year there are three simultaneous tracks of talks. The trouble with this is deciding which talks to go to.

This is my list of talks I’m going to but that could easily change they all sounds interesting!

What To Expect From PHP7 by Lorna Mitchell

We have a new major release of PHP! But what does this mean for PHP developers in the Real World (TM)? This talk has everything you need to know to be the expert. Find out how the remarkable performance improvements could look on your own system, and see the shiny new features in this major release of the web's favorite scripting language. Get advice on how to upgrade your application, making use of the new features and avoiding the backwards compatibility traps. Developers and technical leaders everywhere who want to use better PHP will benefit from this session.

Every Millisecond Counts: Performance & UX by Davey Shafik

How do you lose 900 million dollars in 100ms? Or 8 million visits in just 4/10 of a second? User expectations are higher than ever when it comes to web performance, so much so that we've created an entirely new application architecture just to make it feel like our websites are faster than they actually are. This talk will look at how we can improve our users experience at any scale through performance optimizations at every layer of the stack, from backend to browser.

PSR-7 HTTP messages in the wild by Hannes Van De Vreken

PSR-7 describes common interfaces for representing HTTP messages. HTTP messages are the foundation of web development. Web browsers and HTTP clients such as cURL create HTTP request messages that are sent to a web server, which provides an HTTP response message. Server-side code receives an HTTP request message, and returns an HTTP response message. This talk will explain the interfaces defined by PSR-7, how they define the future of interoperability between frameworks and tools. After that there will be a showcase of several implementations and tools such as zend's diactoros package, Guzzle v6, php-http and other packages that show the real power of shared interfaces for HTTP objects. As most projects are ongoing, this talk will also show how PSR-7 and these other tools can already be used today in existing projects.

MySQL 5.7 + JSON by Morgan Tocker

With the newly added JSON support in MySQL, you can combine the flexibility of NoSQL with the strength of a relational database. In this session, Morgan will explain the new JSON datatype, and the new set of functions for handling JSON documents, available storage and indexing options. In addition, he will present benchmarks showing how much one can expect from the MySQL server in different use case scenarios.

Version Control - tips, tricks and good citizenship by Tess Barnes

Are you nervous of version control even if you don't admit it? Have things got harder since your team expanded? Don’t panic! you’re not on your own. I've put together a run down of some of my tricks, tips and ‘good citizen’ techniques to avoid the worst kinds of conflicts and deal with the remaining ones as efficiently as possible. Join me on a journey through some of the causes of version control pain after which we will visit some social and technical solutions. I'll lead you via branching policies, basic conflict resolution, to more tricky conflict management. We will spend time with some of the lesser known features of version control and command line hacks to stay in charge of multiple branches. As a bonus we will discover how version control can be integrated with other tools having many positive knock on effects for your team and wider business: How forcing commit message formats and automating your change log can help your release process or apps to streamline code reviews can avoid some unnecessary context switching. Triggered notification of interested parties helps keep everyone in the loop especially for breaking changes.

Security Theatre by Thomas Shone

This is not your normal security talk. Sure we talk about secure communication and the importance of hashing and encrypting (and why rolling your own is never a solution). We might even get frisky and cover some more interesting topics like true randomness, timed attacks and social engineering. But what we're really interested in is understanding what that hacker is trying to do on your site, what the motivation is and, using this, understand where you need to be vigilant. We're also going to talk about the results from an ongoing 4 year project to see just how vulnerable the average consumer website is. Theodore Sturgeon famously said 90% of everything is crud, we'll get to see just how close we come to that number. So if you're ready to see how scary the dark depths of security can be and just how scary it is when you look up and see all the leaky boats above us is, this is for you.

Step Into Debugging by Gary Hockin

<?php 
die(var_dump($synopsis)); 

string(406) "While var_dump driven development is great when you're starting, at some point every developer wants more. Step debugging is the answer.

In this session we'll cover the fundamentals of installing and configuring Xdebug, configuring PhpStorm to listen to Xdebug, and then actually step debugging some scripts to find our problems. Step debugging PHP is an incredibly easy and powerful tool when you know how!"

All the cool kids... by Matthias Noback

?The PHP world is spinning quite fast these days. There’s a lot to keep up with. You can’t be an expert in all subjects, so you need a way to find out what’s relevant for you and your team. Which approaches to software development would be useful? Which programming paradigms could help you write better code? And which architectural styles will help your application to survive in this quickly changing world? In this talk I’ll help you answer these questions by taking a bird’s-eye view. I will quickly guide you along some of the most fascinating topics in modern PHP development: DDD, BDD, TDD, hexagonal architecture, CQRS, event sourcing and micro-services. We’ll see how these things are related to each other, and how understanding and applying them can help you improve your software projects in many ways.

Whirlwind tour through the HTTP2 spec by Ole Michaelis

The HTTP protocol has come a long way since its first version HTTP V0.9 in 1991 and with the final release of the HTTP2 spec at the beginning of 2016 a whole next chapter of web development is ahead of us! After a quick tour through the protocol history, we will mine the gems from in HTTP/2 spec and see why this is an awesome step for a modern web. What can you already use today? And why today's best practices are tomorrow's antipatterns?

Automation Automation Automation by Michael Heap

A good rule of thumb to have as a developer is that if you have to do something three times or more, you should automate it. Imagine that a task takes you a minute to do, twice a day. Now imagine that you could write something that does it for you, but it would take an hour. Initially, you'll have lost an hour, but after the first month you'll be breaking even, as you've saved those two minutes per day. Then after the second month, you've essentially gained a free hour. Automation is a developer's best friend. Some things are easier to automate than others, but almost anything can be automated. In this talk, we'll take a look at what can be automated, what tools are available to help us and crucially, *if* we should automate it. Surprisingly, sometimes the answer to the question "should we?" is "no".

Some amazing talks, it’s a shame I can’t get to all the talks! if your going to PHP UK Conference get in touch on twitter @daveismynamecom.