PHPBenelux Virtual Meetup - September 2020
10 Sep 2020 at Online

We have been listening to you and we agree that our community needs more vibrance. We are not able to grant your wishes for in-person events any time soon, but we are working hard to provide a platform for all user groups in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg to make use of to bring their monthly meetups back in virtual form.

As a proof-of-concept we would like to start with a trial session with two amazing speakers from within our own community.

Arnout Boks - Of representation and interpretation: A unified theory
Many hard problems in programming originate from one single source: not properly distinguishing the representation of data from the way it is interpreted. Have you ever written code that filters $_GET for SQL injection attempts? Struggled with timezones? Tried to get escaping right for Javascript in HTML? Detected the character encoding of a string? All are examples of this one problem.

In this talk we will look at some examples of the representation-interpretation problem and find the general pattern behind it. We will see how primitive types make it so hard for us to get this right, and how we can use value objects to steer us in the right direction. You’ll start finding many more examples of this pattern and understand them more easily.

Contains: math, character sets, strong opinions on string escaping, and an almost illegal slide.

Juliette Reinders-Folmer - Regex-fu
Regular expression, you either hate them or you love them, but do you really know how to harness their power ? Based on the PCRE implementation, this talk will show you how to get the most out of your /^regex(es)?$/, how switches affect your results, how to be less greedy, how to assert your power and let's not forget: when *not* to use regex.

PHPBenelux - Uniting the PHP community
The community of PHP communities in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg is how people call us. We have been uniting PHP enthusiasts since 2008 and are helping local PHP user groups in their efforts to share knowledge through meetups and events.
If you like PHP and you live in the Benelux area, be sure to keep an eye out for these user groups, there’s one close to where you live.