Web & PHP Conference
16 - 18 Sep 2013 at San Jose McEnery Convention Center

Well done -- humourous and engaging keynote!

Wim presented a deep-ish dive into caching approaches for your PHP web apps, discussing suitability of the various approaches, good practices, recommendations as well as caveats to consider. Wim also talked about other tips to improve performance. I picked up some good ideas I want to bring back to my team.

Stefan presented a somewhat provocative position that frameworks do not offer the "model" part of the classic MVC approach. It was clear he'd thought a great deal about this, and elaborated at length. However, I didn't come away with a clear idea as to whether frameworks should be completely shunned, or whether they still provide value in terms of providing some structure. I agree that architecture won't emerge just by using them, but I still think they're useful. Full disclosure: I'm on a PHP dev team using ZF2, and we like it -- we find it effective, useful and easy to change or add functionality; but I attribute that to how our leads laid out things, not that ZF2 did that for us innately.

Sebastian presented an interesting take on a view of quality integrated with agile. I found a few topics interesting, such as dark-launching, the pyramids and quadrant of various test types and their profiles. I also appreciate stressing that development and testing need to be one and the same. Suggestion: perhaps discuss how team members from a more traditional testing background or those with more a testing-bent ("how can I break this app?") can best contribute to the quality of the product.

I found Dustin's talk quite interesting in presenting a number of areas to consider about performance of your PHP web apps. I picked up a few tips I intend to share with my team. Dustin's delivery was easy-going and engaged those asking questions.

Oriented towards front-end folks, Frédéric's talk was a battlecry (or reminder for some?) that mobile is taking over desktops, so we need to consider mobile's needs first, not secondarily. Interesting tenet to design for touch first. I guess that means on-hover will go the way of the dodo? :)

Arne and Sebastian presented a straightforward approach of leveraging Jenkins to automate a raft of useful PHP "build" tasks, such as running tests, lint, mess-detection, copy-paste detection, and documentation generation. Extending that to the creation of RPMs via spec files, one could see how easy it would be to generate production-ready builds. They had a good rapport and engaged the audience with their questions. Personally, I wanted to hear more about the production deployment side of things, as I'm already using Jenkins to do our builds.

I found this talk very interesting, in taking the typical architecture and turning it upside down. I learned about a few new things as well, such as Edge Side Includes and applying a reverse proxy. It gave me a few ideas to bring to my team to see if we might be able to leverage them. Arne and Stefan's delivery was also good -- I enjoyed their banter and quasi-arguing.

Thanks for telling your story. It was awesome.

I found the points about emotional design and mood detection quite interesting -- something to consider for the UX side of the house. The other parts of the talk didn't quite resonate with me though.