PHPBenelux meeting May 30 Houthalen
30 May 2012 at Inventis

It has been a while since we last visited our friends at Inventis so it was time to go and see them again. We've got a great lineup scheduled and goodies to give away. So make sure you have May 30 free in your schedule to attend another great PHPBenelux meeting.

Our first speaker of the day needs no further introduction: Harrie Verveer (@harrieverveer) is the public face of the Dutch PHP conference and is a senior PHP developer at ibuildings. He has been working with PHP as a professional since 2004, helping ibuildings to become the company that it is today. He is one of the organizers of the Dutch PHP Conference and a regular speaker at conferences and user group events in Europe, where he shares his experience and knowledge gained from working with a wide variety of technologies. In his spare time Harrie enjoys photography, playing guitar and writing reviews of gigs and CDs for the popular 3voor12 website.

Harry's talk is all about "Recognizing smelly code":
The way the code of an application is organized greatly influences its maintainability, extendability and testability. Finding flaws in your object-oriented design as early as possible can therefore make the difference between an awesome application and a not so good one. Luckily there are a lot of indicators to look out for while you are coding, telling you that you should probably consider refactoring - often without even looking at your actual code! This session is an introduction to the most common code smells and some of the related anti-patterns in OO PHP projects. You will learn how to recognize indicators of deeper underlying problems in your application, and how to prevent these problems from happening in the first place.

Our second speaker is one from our mids: Thijs Feryn (@ThijsFeryn) is an evangelist at Combell, the top Belgian hoster. As an evangelist he supports communities and has a particular love for the PHP community. Thijs is also boardmember of the PHPBenelux user group and organizes the PHPBenelux Conference in January.

Thijs' talk is all about "Scalability issues: cure first, prevent later":
The "it works on my machine" mentality has resulted in numerous face palm moments. This is even more painful when a your app is under heavy load due to a marketing campaign. With some minimal code changes and some smart utilities, you can maximize your scalability and performance. Keywords: Varnish, PHP-FPM, Nginx, APC, CDN, Gearman, Memcached and a proper server setup. I'll show you how you can make a slow app with a crappy code base go mighty fast on one and even multiple servers. The focus of this talk is to cure first and eventually learn and prevent.

Registration:
Let us know you're coming so we can ensure you've got foods and drinks and you automatically participate in the raffles (only valid if present), so head down to the registration form and claim your spot!

Schedule May 30, 2012:
19:00 - 19:30: Welcome and drinks
19:30 - 20:30: Recognizing smelly code by Harry Verveer
20:30 - 21:00: Break
21:00 - 22:00: Scalability issues: cure first, prevent later by Thijs Feryn
22:00 - 22:15: Raffle
22:15 - ...: Drinks and socializing

Location:
Inventis Web Architects
Weg naar Zwartberg 85 b 3
3530 Houthalen
Belgium