#php conference unconference

[kyphpug]

KYPHPUG is Co-organizing the Unconference Day at TECX19 on Sep 19

Get Feedback. Learn New Skills. Share Your Struggles. Come Share Your Code With US.

If you've never participated in an unconference the basic idea is that at a conference the attention is on the stage, at an unconference the attention is on the attendees. It reverses the arrangement and that's why its an 'un'-conference. In practice, what that means is that the most attendees bring a topic to share and register those topics in the morning while we're munching donuts and coffee. Then everyone votes on what they'd like to hear about and we follow the wisdom of the crowd (democracy in action, folks!). You're also very welcome to come and vote and listen and learn even if you're too shy to give a talk.

Plan for your topics to be 15, 25, or 45 minutes. We've going to group the talks by skill level as well, so we're sure to deliver information at the speed the audience is already at. We're going to send out a call for presentations as we get closer to the event and will open voting the day before the event.

Ticket Required - First 100 Students are FREE Schedule and details here: https://www.tecx19.com/schedule/thursday-sep-19#unconference Purchase tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tecx-tickets-63022885146

[oskytech]

SymfonyCon 2017

The 5th edition of Sensiolabs’s SymfonyCon took place in Cluj-Napoca (Romania).

Cluj, the European Youth Capital of two years ago, is a dynamic city with a large university center and a fastly growing software industry. The conference felt equally dynamic, with its varied choice of activities: workshops, lectures, a hackday, unconference speeches, community talks and social events.

Five members of the OpenSky team flew in through a thick fog to participate in the conference, for the opportunity to hear about Symfony 4 directly from creators and contributors, attend the good assortment of talks and get a feel for the international and local community. Symfony is at the core of the OpenSky technical stack, and Pablo Godel’s conference lecture gave a glimpse into how we use it and how we keep things running smoothly (and fastly paced too!), for our large-scale e-commerce applications.

Two days of workshops preceded the actual conference, which lasted for another couple of days, on the 16th and 17th of November. The talks were organized into three tracks, taking place at the same time in adjacent rooms: track advanced, beginner and PHP, with the criteria to split not always obvious.

The conference debuted with Fabien Potencier’s keynote.

At 9AM, Fabien Potencier delivered his keynote, not surprisingly in front of a room packed full of people. It was focused on the eagerly expected Symfony 4, lightweight, easy to start with, easy to turn into a full-fledged application. In a hands-down fashion, a live demo of installing a Symfony 4 application with SymfonyFlex was delivered in parallel with Fabien’s words. It showed a quick route from 'Hello World' to a full stack app, blink and you've missed it.

Package aliases in Flex recipes, turning commands into readable, easy to remember English, the Maker Bundle, that automates the creation of controllers, forms and other structures, were among the additions that make Symfony 4 so simple to start with. For existing users, which we suspect was the case for most of the people in attendance, Fabien declared a smooth upgrade path, from the very the first sentences of his keynote speech.

We were left to ponder on the difference that Symfony 4 will make in the adoption of new users and how soon we can upgrade our applications to benefit from the new approach.

Twenty six other talks, including 3 keynotes with a full audience, made up the rest of the conference.

There were worthy lectures in all of the tracks, making the selection difficult at times, and a few of them are mentioned below, in no particular order.

Nicolas Grekas discussing new features and performance of a central part of Symfony, ‘Dependency Injection Component v4.0’, attracted a high number of viewers. He spoke of features such as autoconfiguration (“automate your own config by defining your own conventions”), that every class is potentially a service and everything is by default private, of autowiring by service identifier, processing environment variables, of new features as it relates to performance and the compiled container. A slideshow worth revisiting slide by slide.

‘Lessons learned building the Composer internals’, held by Jordi Boggiano concluded the first day of the conference and gave an inside glimpse into challenges encountered while writing code or in the management of the development process. It was an insight into what it takes to provide good service for a software that is so widely used and on such a variety of systems and configurations. The presenter also drew on lessons learned in managing open-source contributions, and the sustainability of open-source projects with a high growth rate.

Marco Pivetta's 'Event Sourcing: The good, the bad and the complicated' was a real-life example of a code review marketplace where the domain of the application is modelled as a finite-state machine, with immutable states and transitions between them. With this model, the state of the application can be obtained by playing the entire sequence of events, which is persisted in a database. He went into details about implementing such a model in PHP, what are some of the solution’s advantages and what could go wrong.

‘Webpack Encore - Pro JavaScript and CSS for Everyone’ saw Ryan Weaver, in his usual gripping speech, present a simpler way to integrate Webpack into a Symfony app.

David Buchmann spoke of 'Decoupling an application with message queues', covering general notions of a message queue system, how AMQP-compliant message queues can be accessed from PHP, benefits and caveats.

‘API Platform and Symfony’ by Kévin Dunglas was an example of starting up a HTTP REST API application in a very short time, complete with CRUD functionality, documentation, and an administration interface for testing. The questions from the audience were related to authentication and authorization support, which were not included in the demo, and API versioning, which is not available.

The opening of the second day was the keynote on ‘PHP 7 and beyond: 7.2+’, where Sara Golemon gave an instructive overview of the new language features introduced in the minor versions of PHP 7 and the possible new features to be added in later versions.

Sarah Khalil’s ‘A year of Symfony’ keynote was a good wrap-up talk on what has been achieved in the last year in Symfony, marking the 1 billion download milestone, notable features added in 3.4, the upcoming Symfony 4, numbers of pull requests and issues fixed.

Symfony is a central part of OpenSky

Pablo Godel’s ‘Symfony at OpenSky’ gave a window into how we work at OpenSky to develop successful, large-scale applications with Symfony, working from offices on three continents. He went through OpenSky’s technology stack and the application organization into bundles, with general recommendations and lessons learned along the way from the early adoption of Symfony 2.0 in 2010. He has shown how the instrumentation of the development process from coding to production deploy ensures a fast deployment pipeline to release as frequent as necessary. OpenSky’s commitment to Symfony coding standards, best practices and good code coverage help maintainability and save development time.

There was good opportunity to deliver unscheduled speeches and meet the community.

For those that had missed the submissions deadline, there was a second chance to speak on stage, either in the Community Talks (7-minute speeches about the community or an open source project contribution) or in the Unconference. The latter filled the entire PHP track of the second day, and some saw this as a venue to ask questions, others talked about small subject. All in all, it was a good way to get people prepared to hold a talk and to get the community’s feedback in a more informal way.

Informal was also the mood at the happy hour, which took place in the evening of the first day in one of the clubs in Cluj, where there was mingling and even some dancing, which left us to wonder if the low number of women in the conference is representative of the Symfony community.

All too soon it was time for community awards, much applause and even a groupHug() to end a successful conference, leaving the community to look forward to next year’s event in Lisbon. Don’t miss the opportunity, it is well worth it.