PHPSW: A New Type of Year, Jan 2020
8 Jan 2020 at Runway East: Bristol

PHP 7 introduced type declarations and so brought PHP into the world of strict typing. Each subsequent release in the 7 series has improved this and PHP 7.4 is no different with exciting new type features. In addition, PHP 7 enabled static analysis tools that coupled with type declarations enable us to significantly remove bugs in our code before we even run it! In this talk, I will review PHP's strict type system, including the new PHP 7.4 features and show how they can make our code safer and clearer and easier to reason about. We will then turn our attention to the available static analysis tools and look at how, with strict typing, we can eliminate whole classes of bugs and make our applications better. By the end of this session, you will be well placed to write better PHP code that has fewer bugs and works as you expect every time.

All developers know that bugs are bad and finding them can be difficult. The good news is tools to help us find and prevent bugs are becoming more powerful... Modern static analysis tools (e.g. IDEs like PHPStorm and tools like Psalm, Phan and PHPStan) are far more advanced then their predecessors. They can find a whole range of bugs whilst keeping the false positive rate low. This talk introduces more advanced static analysis. It will show the kinds of bugs that the more advanced static analysis tools can find. We'll then look how they can be added to your current development work flow. We'll finally look at how we can write our code in such a way to get the most out of static analysis. Wherever you are on your static analysis journey this talk will show you the next step.