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!