PHP Tek 2026
19 - 21 May 2026 at Sheraton O'Hare Suites

Great perspective on team dynamics. Trusting your team is critical to organizational success.

I'm giving this a high rating because, despite it being James's first conference talk, he seemed comfortable with his delivery, and he delivered insights that it took me years to gain. I really enjoyed hearing about his experiences, and it was interesting to see comparisons between things learned in school and those learned in the industry.

I think James could expand this talk a bit more to go deeper into each section, providing ideas for how developers can bridge the knowledge/experience gap between school and industry, perhaps with school and industry working together to help. It seems like something that might go over well with an audience of educators and engineering managers.

Another fantastic Grunwell talk. Just the right ratio of usable info and snark. I’d consider my regex skills above average, but how I didn’t know (at least consciously) that uppercase was a negation is baffling.

Funny how often technology moves over a decade in one direction, only to pivot back the other way. ORMs hide so much of SQL's powerful features. Scott did a great job talking about some of the deeper parts of SQL that used to be pretty common, like stored procedures and views.

As always Larry's very opinionated about tech topics, but can back up his opinions. I spent most of the conference after this talk refactoring some of my tests to better use TestWith and DataProviders, adding Test and TestDox attributes, and in general cleaning things up.

I didn't know you could do that with Nginx! Great presentation about how to block Canadians from using your site, among other more useful Nginx things. Only improvement would be to slow down a bit, it felt like you were rushing and talking very quickly.

Probably my favorite talk of this year's conference. As someone that has used event sourcing at a previous employer, I knew some of the concepts, but the edges were a bit fuzzy. We're about to implement event sourcing at my current employer and this really solidified what steps I need to take immediately.

Good overview of what an MCP server is, why you might want to build one, and what PHP packages you should use depending on your tech stack.

Agreed on all the comments. Thank you for being there. I will do better!

Fantastic way to teach foundational concepts!