It’s a tradition for 4 or 5 years in row now, to attend PHP Benelux . It’s the conference focussed on PHP in the Benelux, for me (I’m not counting the Dutch PHP Conference , since I’ve never attended one yet).
Last year I even gave a presentation there .
This year was more about attending: a tutorial session and full-time conference + socials.
Docker Tutorial#
The morning was a tutorial on Docker , given by Andreas Hucks . The preparation was superb, everyone had clear instructions clone a git repo and download a vagrant box , everything was nicely packaged. The box itself worked perfectly. This is what preparations should be.
I heard from colleagues that their tutorials were first consuming an hour or more on setting up the environment. In a 3-hour tutorial, that’s more than 30% of the time.
A clean github repo with Vagrant boxes and we were set. Perfect!
The tutorial itself was fast-paced, everyone was following along. A lot of content in just 3 hours. And I learned a lot, so thank you Andreas!
Maximize Growth as a Software Developer#
Well this was new. A rabbi (yes, a coderabbi )) giving a talk about the similarities in Jewish religion/culture and software development, with tips to grow further as a software developer.
My key-takeaways I should check;
- PHP Mentoring.org
- mhprompt.org , making mental illnesses more of a topic instead of something to be embarrassed about (which reminded me of Funkatron ’s Open Sourcing Mental Illness talk)
- up-for-grabs.net , contributing to open source with low hanging fruit (thanks for the reminder, Freek !)
There were countless other ideas/arguments that I just forgot to write down. Including the link about “low hanging fruit” and “how to get into open source”, if anyone still has that?
Low-Level PHP: Gettings things done with Go#
The Go Language has been on my radar for a while. I’ve read quite a bit about it and it’s multi-threading model is really powerful. My problem with it? Finding a use-case in every day life.
I liked the presentation , it covered a practical scenario with code examples and comparisons to the PHP world. I’ll remember the quote “Go is like programming in PHP4” as a reference to more functional programming (especially since I came from the PHP4 world).
Clear talk, good instructions. I appreciated the good & lesser sides of Go. It’s not all roses and sunshine, so it’s important to know the limitations and the strengths of a new language.
Go is still on my todo-list.
Getting Started with Continuous Integration#
I think I had different expectations from this talk . It mentioned all the tools (that I was assuming everyone already knew about): PHPUnit , PHP_CodeSniffer , phpmd (PHP Mess Detector) , phing , …
I was expecting a talk about how to tie those all together, make a strategy for actual CI and how to implement it. Instead, it gave the building blocks with the solution still to be built. Maybe I misread the introduction or was interpreting the title differently. It wasn’t for me, but that isn’t to say it was a bad talk. For someone unknown to those tools, it was a really good introduction.
Conference Graphics#
Not so much the conference, but @sgrame (Peter Decuyper) made some really impressive illustrations during the presentations that he posted on his twitter account.
#phpbnl15 @coderabbi gets it pic.twitter.com/gFDWfsQHm9
— Peter Decuyper (@sgrame) January 23, 2015
The socials#
They never disappoint. In part because the organisation puts in a lot of effort, with sponsors and side animation, but mainly because in the Benelux the PHP community consists of really nice people. I had a few drinks, a lot of laughs and even more interesting talks with known and unknown people.
But I failed in my plan:
#phpbnl15: the art of matching real people with their Twitter handle/profile.
— ma.ttias.be (@mattiasgeniar) January 23, 2015
Something to try next: better facial recognition!
Looking forward to Saturday!