PHP UK Conference 2019

Our job might be to build web applications, but we can't build apps that rely on networking if we don't know how these networks and the big network that connects them all (this thing called the Internet) actually work. I'll walk through the basics of networking, then dive a lot deeper (from TCP/UDP to IPv4/6, source/destination ports, sockets, DNS, switching, firewalling and even OSPF, VRRP and BGP). Prepare for an eye-opener when you realize how much a typical app relies on all of these (and many more) working flawlessly... and how you can prepare your app for failure in the chain.

Your App Lives on a Network: Networking for Web Developers - Wim Godden - PHP UK Conference 2019

The talk aims to highlight the importance of testing, why developers must spend more of their time testing, how testing generates more robust applications and why testing makes developers' lives easier.

The talk is based around a live coding demo. 

The talk will:

- Explain the difference between tests that prove an application works and tests which aim to break the application logic. 
- Highlight how test to break principles force developers to introduce logic to handle unexpected behaviour.
- Show how test to break principles result in more robust applications as developers write code that can only be used in one way. 
- Encourage developers to apply test to break principles to all types of tests, including manual tests.

Test to Break Principles  - Rob Waller - PHP UK Conference 2019

Over the years, software teams have questioned if PHP is a good choice for building web services. In this talk, I will share how we use PHP on the backend for Glu Mobile’s flagship mobile game Design Home, enabling it to regularly rank amongst the top free mobile games - both in downloads and grossing - since its launch in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store in Q4 2016. Design Home reaches over 1 million daily active users, serving over 100,000 requests per minute while maintaining a user base of over 30 million players. To date, over 1 billion designs have been made by players. We will deep dive into the thought processes, development, testing and deployment strategy, showcasing what we have achieved with PHP and why we love it and rely on it. My goal is to share with the community that, when done the right way, PHP can be used to build and maintain reliable, massively-scalable and high-performance backends using web services.

Massively Scaled High Performance Web Services with PHP -  Demin Yin - PHP UK Conference 2019

Continuous Delivery Pipeline as code is key helping you to ensure long term maintainability. Treating your pipeline as code helps you to version it in your SCM of choice, makes changes easily traceable and lets anyone on your team make required changes. In this session I will show you how we build and maintain our Continuous Delivery pipeline using tools like GitLab CI, Docker, Nexus and Traefik. Together we will take a deep dive into the GitLab CI Build Pipelines to build and deploy docker containers to dev, stage and production environments.

From Dev to Prod with GitLab CI - Stephan Hochdorfer - PHP UK Conference 2019

The blockchain is a hot new topic in the technology due to the rise of various cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin being a most prominent example. How does it work? What advantages does it give? What problems do they solve? What problems can be solved that way? I want you to dive with me into the immutable world of blocks where I will explain everything, from a simple hash, through Merkle trees, up to implementing your own blockchain.

Dive Deep Into Blockchain - Tomasz Kowalczyk -  PHP UK Conference 2019

As a kid, do you have ambitions for the future? “When I grow up I want to become a …”. Maybe you wanted to become a fireman, an astronaut, a nurse, a teacher, or a police officer? As you grow up, these ideas evolve and get replaced with actual ambitions, actual hopes and dreams. These might be entirely different than your childhood dreams.

But how do you reach these goals?
How do you accomplish these dreams?
By listening to your parents, friends, or teachers?
By doing it yourself?
Or maybe, you have given up and settled for a watered down version of the career and life you envisioned?

People often attribute success to luck, and lack of success to incompetence. But what if I told you it’s all about controlling the variables?

Luck is something that you can control in a way. The more you figure out the context, the key players, the relationships, the values, and the rules of the ecosystem in which you want to succeed, the easier it is to gain from it. The more variables you control, the easier it is to find potential opportunities and to bank on them.

Maybe you didn’t get lucky, maybe you just saw it coming, and prepared yourself for it.

In this talk, Thijs is going to share his experiences, his hopes, his dreams, and how he applies a positive mental attitude to level up in his career, and in life in general.

This is not a growth hacking talk, but a simple set of tips and tricks to succeed, even if it seems like the odds are stacked against you.

Controlling the Variables - Thijs Feryn - PHP UK Conference 2019

15 years ago, plain text password storing was normal with some using MD5. We look back now and wonder what we were thinking! With GDPR and people thinking more about personal details, its about time we caught up and started storing them securely. There are many uses for personal data and is often sought after by criminals for targeting people. How can you prevent your customers data being used in these attacks ? Encrypting your database is a fantastic way! PHP is the first language to have modern encryption built in to the core, This talk will show you how to use these methods to allow your data to be secure and also not lose the speed which you can currently search for this data in your application. This talk will touch on architecture and will be focused on MySQL although the same techniques can be used for any storage engine.

Database Encryption in a GDPR World - Scott Dutton - PHP UK Conference 2019

🎵Everything is cool when you’re part of a team!🎵

The Lego Movie came out almost 4 years ago, and it taught children everywhere the importance of teamwork. And what teamwork, and working in harmony, actually is. Let’s just hope that those lessons really stick with these kids. Because let’s be honest, we’re making a mess of it.

But it’s not too late for us. We can learn from the Lego Movie as well. I’ll show you how you can help to make sure everyone feels safe and respected in your team and your company. How you can feel better being the unique person you are within your team. And how you can make your, and everyone else’s, life more awesome!

Everything is Awesome - Paul Verbeek Mast - PHP UK Conference 2019

APIs and microservices are how we build modern web applications and serverless technologies make this easy. This session will show you how serverless applications are built and how you can leverage your PHP skills to build APIs of all shapes and sizes. We will cover how to use your current knowledge to build applications in PHP within Apache OpenWhisk, leveraging the API Gateway to build robust APIs quickly and easily. By the end of the session, you’ll be well placed to design and build your own applications that take full advantage of the power of serverless technologies.

Running Your PHP Site on AWS Lambda - Neal Brooks - PHP UK Conference 2019

Have you ever heard yourself or someone else say “Don’t deploy on Friday”? Perhaps it’s your company’s policy?

I Deploy on Fridays (And Maybe You Should Too) Michiel Rook - PHP UK Conference 2019

Since it's founding, Tebex has processed over 18 million payments for games servers around the world. This is a rich data source, and one that we've significantly under-used. We know there should be ways of using this data to improve our product and to make our merchant's lives easier - how and where to start, now that's a totally different question! Join Liam as he shares Tebex's initial experiences in experimenting with machine learning to use past data to prevent fraud in the future - different algorithms we've tried, (many) failed experiments, the situation today and plans for the future.

Learning The Hows and Whys of Machine Learning - Liam Wiltshire - PHP UK Conference 2019

PHP's flexibility makes it easy for beginners to start programming, but it also allows for projects to easily evolve into a coupled spaghetti architecture that makes them hard to maintain. SOLID design principles can help us write code that's easier to understand, extend and maintain.

From Good To SOLID: How to Become a Better PHP Developer? - Katerina Trajchevska - PHP UK 2019

Learning more than one programming language is key to becoming a better developer. It is like adding a new tool to your toolbox. The more tools you have, the easier and quicker you’ll be able to tackle whatever job you need to do. You’ll also be able to use the right tool for the job, and who doesn’t like that?! I picked up Go (golang) a few years ago as it was becoming more popular among developers. Coming from a PHP background, I had no idea what channels or goroutines were or how is concurrency different from parallelism. I’ve got to say, it was a whole new world. Very different, but very cool. I was hooked! By happy coincidence, my company was looking to rewrite a legacy PHP app in Go. It was over 2000 lines of procedural and messy PHP4 with more downtime than I’m willing to admit to. I took on this project, and soon enough we had a much faster, more maintainable and much more reliable app for our customers. Go gave us options we would not have in PHP. The goal of this talk is to give you a good idea of what Go is and how it compares with PHP. We’ll look at the language itself as well as the tooling and communities around it. Even if you’re not sold on Go by the end of it, I hope you’ll leave inspired to go out there and learn whatever language you wanted to look into next.

Get GOing with a New Language - Kat Zien - PHP UK Conference 2019

Learn in this talk the new out of the box features of the most popular database in the world! It will blow your mind what you can do with just plain old SQL. Come on and watch the live demo!

MySQL 8.0: Not Only Good, it's GREAT - Gabriela D'Avila Ferrara - PHP UK Conference 2019

After days, weeks, or months of coding many developers don’t know how to gauge the quality of their code. I’ll introduce tools to grade, benchmark, and analyze PHP code in an automated fashion allowing developers to write better quality software. Then I’ll explain key metrics to help understand what may need to be refactored, and use code smells to point out bugs before end-users discover them. Attendees will see how to use these tools, know where to find them, and be able to implement them in their own workflows.

Does Your Code Measure Up? - Adam Culp - PHP UK Conference 2019

In this presentation we will look at storing complex data in a single field. Many noSQL solutions are created around this (such as Redis’ lists, sets and hashes; MongoDB’s records), and many relational database now also support storing complex data in a single field through specific data types (such as PostGreSQL’s JSONB or hstore). Each of the different database engines support different things, and handle these data types in different ways. In this session we compare the different approaches to storage, indexing and interactions with these data types in different databases.

Storing Non-Scalar Data - Derick Rethans - PHP UK Conference 2019

Database joins can be expensive and you can reduce dives into the indexes/data by using JSON columns. By loading data kept in smaller 'stub' tables into main tables it is possible to minimize joins for simple data like address, phone numbers, and the like in schemaless JSON documents. Yes, third normal form or better has advantages at many levels but it is a design that is costly for many-to-many relations! It is very easy to refactor data is is often stagnant or infrequently updated to take advantage of hybrid SQL/NoSQL databases to greatly increase overall query performance plus increase code readability. This approach can completely change your ideas on data architecture and provide easy mutability for future changes.

How De-normalizing Your Data with JSON Can Boost Query Performance - David Stokes - PHP UK 2019

Alice and Bob have covered the basics of secure communication but cryptography can offer us more than this. After a brief refresher on the basics, we'll take a look at some of these other aspects of cryptography including hash functions, elliptic curves and quantum cryptography. Then we'll take a look at some practical applications answering questions such as: can I trust a web of trust? or should I use a block chain for this?

More Secrets of Cryptography - Chris Riley - PHP UK Conference 2019

Microservices are the latest architectural trend to take the PHP community by storm. Is it a good pattern? How can you use it effectively? In this talk, we'll explore real world experience building out a large scale application based around microservices: what worked really well, what didn't work at all, and what we learned along the way. Spoiler alert: we got a lot wrong.

Microservices Gone Wrong - Anthony Ferrara - PHP UK Conference 2019

Building REST APIs is becoming an ever more common task for PHP developers to do and whilst the task may often sound simple in that it involves reading some input, and getting (or persisting) to a data source and returning some JSON, there are a lot of common pitfalls and complications that you might encounter along the way. In this talk we'll look at how we can build a simple maintainable REST API using the Symfony components that can perform some simple operations in ways that are clean and simple.

Building first-class REST APIs with Symfony - Michael Cullum - PHP UK Conference 2019

PHP UK Conference 2020

Introducing Hammock, a new open source mocking library for Hacklang. Hammock aims to provide disposable interfaces for mocking and spying public, protected, private, and static methods - as well as global functions - without altering their behavior. Using `fb_intercept` under the hood for mocking and unmocking, it also allows mocking of an individual object without affecting other instances of the same class. Come learn more about Hammock and how you can use this to test your code.

Testing Hack with Hammock - Riya Dashoriya - PHP UK 2020

The role of our API in Switzerland is to consume a lot of data that was not meant for a digital age and to transform it into beautiful output, for one of the biggest retailers in Switzerland. This is a journey of consuming a lot of data and APIs from different sources and in different formats. Some of them made us laugh, some of us got migraines. We built a smooth architecture to consume and output data. I am proud of our architecture that we seamlessly upgraded to keep the latest versions, now Symfony 4 along the way. I want to share with you how we managed to keep this API up to date for over 5 years and the architecture that we use to make it happen.

Messy data != Messy code - Michelle Sanver - PHP UK 2020

Running PHP used to be as simple as copying files onto a shared host via FTP. What if we could get back to something that simple, but gain in security, performances and scalability as well? Let’s deploy PHP on AWS Lambda using Bref, an open-source solution for building serverless PHP applications.

Serverless PHP applications with Bref - Matthiew Napoli - PHP UK 2020

I can't test this code because it's legacy. I need to update the code to make it testable. How can I manage that, without breaking existing functionality? I'll need to write some tests, but... argh!

Testing Legacy Code: Safe Refactoring - Katy Ereira - PHP UK 2020

Everybody wants quick applications. A lot of that speed can be gained by the way you write your software, but a big chunk has to do with the way PHP is configured.

PHP OPCache, Realpath Cache and Preloading - Jachim Coudenys - PHP UK 2020

If you’re a junior developer who’s ever wondered if joining tech was a terrible idea, this is the talk for you! The road to success is often zigzaggy, and having emerged on the other side, I feel it’s my duty to pass on some hard-earned lessons.

What I Learned my First Year as a Full-time Programmer - Hilary Stohs Krause - PHP UK 2020

Time-Series has been the fastest growing database category, rated, by DBEngines, for over 2 years; yet, less than 15% store their time-series data in a time-series database. Do you?

Introduction to Time Series - David McKay - PHP UK 2020

Static code analysis can help you automate the boring parts of your code reviews. This talk is an overview of several tools and tips on how to use them in new and existing projects, featuring the following tools that can help you: Stop nit-picking your colleagues’ code style (Easy Coding Standard), keep up with best practices (Psalm, PHPStan, PHP Insights) and generate graphs visualising your dependencies (Deptrac, PhpMetrics).

Static Code Analysis: Judging a Forest by Its Trees - Christian Rades - PHP UK 2020

There is a stereotype of programmers as being antisocial and difficult, and unfortunately many of us take on this attitude as if it comes with the job – but it doesn’t have to be this way! I know it from experience, because I’ve been an angry, judgmental know-it-all, and I’m ready to tell you how I completely changed my attitude and refactored my life.

RTFM - Jessica Mauerhan - PHP UK 2020

In case the talk title was too subtle, this session deals with ways to improve your security. Today authentication is evolving to keep up with enterprise and user needs. Hardening the authentication can also at times become a hassle for end user. Come find out how can we better secure our applications with multi-factor Authentication, while giving the users the comfort of Single Sign On. Learn about Identity Providers & how Federated Authentication works and dig deeper into the buzz words of the authentication world - OAuth and OIDC.

In the world of Password123, be someone's #@%^)*! - Ipsha Bhidonia - PHP UK 2020

APIs are a trivial part of development. But there are number of challenges that come along right from data fetching to iterating over endpoints. Worry not GraphQL is here to the rescue. Come dive into the world of GraphQL and learn to develop efficient and easy to understand APIs!

GraphQL API in PHP - Drishti Jain - PHP UK 2020

We are going to look at the new features in PHP 7.4. Join me to have a look at how the type system is strengthened with typed properties and co- and contra-variance of methods, what changes to operator precedence are, and which new features, such as pre-loading classes, have been added.

The La(te)st PHP 7 — What's new in PHP 7.4 - Derrick Rethans - PHP UK 2020

Support for generics is high up many PHP developers’ wish lists. This talk is a deep dive into generics, their benefits and how, with existing tools, we can get the power of generics today.

PHP Generics Today (almost) - Dave Liddament - PHP UK 2020

Open Source is one of the most powerful human concepts that has come out of the computer revolution. It is one of the key drivers of innovation to this day, despite being a core concept of computing back in the days of when large room-sized computers roamed the land. PHP was born out of the concept and ideals of open source software and is one of the most prevalent languages still in regular use. Why is that? What is so important about Open Source Software, PHP, and how does it affect you as a developer? Let me tell you a story…

PHP, The Last True Open Source Language - Chris Tankersley - PHP UK 2020

Docker is not just about deploying containers to hundreds of servers. Developers need tools that help with day-to-day tasks and to do their job more effectively. Docker is a great addition to most workflows, from starting projects to writing utilities to make development less repetitive. Docker can help take care of many problems developers face during development such as “it works on my machine” as well as keeping tooling consistent between all of the people working on a project. See how easy it is to take an existing development setup and application and move it over to Docker, no matter your operating system.

Killer Docker Workflows for Development - Chris Tankersley - PHP UK 2020

DevOps teams are in constant search for magical solutions to their technology woes, but not properly vetting solutions can cause unintended effects. These choices lead to bad design decisions & compound technical debt. In this talk, Angel will share advice to avoid the Shiny Object syndrome.

Apps, Stacks, and Frameworks: Avoiding “Shiny Object” Syndrome - Angel Rivera - PHP UK 2020

The end is nigh. Your application is almost ready, and you will need to deploy it. And with the deployment, the endless tweaking to get everything running on your production servers. If only there were a way to test everything first. That is where containers will come in to save the day. With containers, you not only run your code in an environment similar to the production server, but you also run your code in precisely the same environment. In this talk, the attendees will learn about how to create container friendly applications, how to use containers to share their code with their team and finally, how to use those same containers to deploy to a production server with minimal efforts.

Containerization for Software Developers - Joel Lord - PHP UK 2020

Working in the tech industry can put a lot of pressure on people. Long hours, tight deadlines and a culture of always being connected can easily lead to depression or burnout. Through the sharing of the speaker’s personal experience, the attendees will learn to help people that might be experiencing distress and stop keeping this subject taboo. 1 in 5 Europeans are dealing with mental illness and the costs associated with this is too high to ignore. Join us to see how you can help to reduce the risks associated with this plague.

Post Burnout Thoughts - Joel Lord - PHP UK 2020

After working on AI-powered applications for a while now, we applied a lot of the lessons learned in building our own bot. Johnny, our DevOps chatbot, enables the release manager skip the confusing discussions with the tekkies and master the release process. It’s using NLP, so you don’t feel like talking to a bot, rather to a teammate. In this session you will learn about the building blocks of Johnny, dive into how each plays its part (pointing out reasoning behind our design decisions), and then we’ll get to do a live demo to see how all fits together. A bot framework is used to pass on information to “the brain”, which decodes your message using Natural Language Processing, and if it’s below a configurable certitude threshold comes and asks you for confirmation/clarification. Once the task to be executed is understood, the “brain” goes on to execute it and hand you over the results.

Meet Johnny the Deployer - Georgiana Gligor - PHP UK 2020

One main goal of great UX design is designing products that ANYONE can use. If you are not thinking about accessibility, then you’re not thinking about the full user experience. Accessibility makes it possible for people with disabilities to understand and navigate well designed products.

Guidelines on Designing for Accessibility in UX Design - Christiana Unaeze - PHP UK 2020

PHP UK Conference 2022

Software developers all know: continual learning is part of the job. And that's what so many of us love about it. Innovation is constant, and it's an exciting challenge to keep up with so many new technologies. But where do all these new concepts, frameworks, and patterns come from? Let’s take a journey through the history of innovation to explore how different worlds collided to inspire new, radical ideas. Let’s discover how cross-pollination has helped our community grow into what it is now, and can help us think of new ways to solve complex problems. Join us for a session of inspirational stories that illustrate how cross-pollination has helped form some of history’s most profound innovations, and will hopefully inspire you to conjure up your own radical new ideas.

Never stop learning, how curiosity and cross pollination drives innovation-Pauline Vos - PHP UK 2022

During this presentation, we are going to look at the new features that were introduced in PHP 8.1. Join me to have a look at how the type system is strengthened with Enumerations and “never”, Fibers, a new closure syntax, the First Class Callable Syntax, intersection types, and other new smaller features. At the end you will have a good understanding about all the new and exciting features that are part of the PHP 8.1 release.

What's New in PHP 8.1 - Derick Rethans - PHP UK 2022

As developers, we want to work in a modern way, to get fast feedback on what we are building to make sure that we are building the right things in the right way. However, many companies are still at the start of their journey. Things take longer than we would like to get moving, sometimes change can seem to happen at a glacial pace and whilst you are ready to try and run, others are finding their feet - or even digging in their heels! In this talk, Stacy will go over some of the pitfalls that have happened to her, and the lessons that she has learned from them. Unfortunately, there are no magic solutions to make the problems go away, but hopefully, you can look at the mistakes she has made and go away to make your own new ones to learn from!

Embrace the Pitfalls (Our stop start journey to Change) - Stacy Cashmore - PHP UK 2022

When building Covie, Ian got to pick his tech stack, including where and how to run it. The choice was containerised on ECS with AWS, starting on Fargate…and so far, so good. He walks through how to set this stack up, with some tips and tricks along the way.

Container-native without k8s: PHP in ECS on AWS - Ian Littman - PHP UK 2022

OpenAPI is the standard way to describe your HTTP API, adopted by most modern APIs. With the spec at the centre of your workflow, you can improve the quality of your API and development practices, and make integrations painless. With standardisation comes tooling and in this session, I will show you to leverage this to your advantage. In this talk, Rob covers what OpenAPI is, why it’s interesting and then how to use it. He also looks at how the OpenAPI specification enables you to create documentation, use mock servers and improve the robustness of our API with validation. This session is ideal for anyone who wants to write an API specification once and use it everywhere.

Improve your API and OpenAPI - Rob Allen - PHP UK 2022

Well written instructions, informative comments throughout code, clearly scripted screencasts, and smart information architecture can take complex code and make it accessible to new developers. In the age of code sharing, this can be imperative to teaching the next generation of developers, passing along your code to successors, and help you better understand your own work.

Technically speaking: Improve Your Code With Documentation - Alexandra White - PHP UK 2022

Learn how to build and deploy serverless PHP applications. During the workshop Mike explores Bref, a way to run PHP functions and HTTP APIs on AWS Lambda. He deploys and plays with a pre-built application, as well as explore how you can migrate your existing workloads. AWS DynamoDB is a highly scalable document/key-value store, which offers a lot of flexibility for developers with a steep learning curve. He covers the basics of this platform, and set you up to learn and develop more, whilst avoiding potential pitfalls that might hurt your production applications.

Going serverless with PHP and Bref.sh - Mike Lehan - PHP UK 2022

Confused by JavaScript’s weird object model? Getting it, but still missing some details? You’re a JS master and you want to see your favourite object model in PHP land? In this talk, Milko digs into the JS object model and try to recreate it using PHP magic! He explores the JavaScript object model and recreate it in PHP.

Make me a JS Object Model - Milko Kosturkov - PHP UK 2022

In this talk Sam gives a quick overview of the past, present and future of authentication. From basic authentication to passwordless biometric authentication using the web authentication API, and everything in between.

Passwords are so 1990 - Sam Bellen - PHP UK 2022

We sometimes talk about businesses contributing to open source as a philanthropic act, it’s much more than that. Business is an important part of a healthy open source ecosystem, and the benefits flow in both directions. In this talk we’ll discuss how open source participation can be rewarding for staff and for the bottom line. Lorna covers ways to get started without impacting delivery of the projects you’re already working on, ways to pitch this to higher-ups, and times when it might be better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. PHP is in every organisation, and it’s a great example of a thriving Open Source ecosystem. This talk is for everyone who wants to see a bright future for technology, open source, individuals and businesses alike.

Open Source is Good for Business - Lorna Jane Mitchell - PHP UK 2022

Fibers give us the stepping stone for more sane (looking) and modern async programming. But on their own, they don’t seem to offer much, so how does it work? Well, in this talk, Milko shows us how we do our own async Proof-Of-Concept framework using them and find out!

PHP Fibers - Milko Kosturkov - PHP UK 2022

Nowadays Kubernetes can run anywhere. On a developer machine, on premise, in a public cloud as well as on the edge. The common Kubernetes API makes it faster and easier to deploy workloads and manage network connectivity, storage, load balancing, security or service discovery. This allows you to leverage the best of all worlds and combine on-premise, private and public clouds to a hybrid environment that distributes your workloads as efficiently as possible. On the other hand, you quickly end up running not only one or two clusters, but dozens, or in edge and IOT scenarios even thousands or millions. In this talk Bastian will show how Rancher can help you to successful provision, manage and monitor these clusters, as well as the workloads running in them, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.

Managing from 1 to 1 million Kubernetes Clusters - Bastian Hofmann - PHP UK 2022

Over the past 16 years as a web developer Chandeep has seen his fair share of car crashes in projects. He's been lucky to move up the ranks to Senior Dev, Lead Dev, Tech Lead and now Solutions Architect. In this talk he shares some of the things he wish he knew to avoid the problems, stresses & late nights and deliver successful technical projects and delight your clients.

Technical scoping like a pro to build the right thing & be a superhero- Chandeep Khosa - PHP UK 2022

Blockchain is innovative and guarantees the fidelity and security of data and generates trust without the need for a trusted third party. The core lies in its ability to be secure, eliminate trust, being reliable and decentralized. It gives ‘POWER’ to all equally and creates transparency. In this talk Drishti shows us how to transform and become a blockchain developer with PHP. She talks about Digital Signature transaction encryption, avoiding counterfeit using node agreement. The core basis of blockchain and cryptography lies in the Cryptographic hash function.  She showcases what it is, how to choose and develop the hash function and all about cryptography, covering end-of-chain ambiguity, blockchain mining and mining pools. So, gear up and fuel your excitement for blockchain using PHP through her talk.

Hop on the PHP Blockchain rocket to the MOON! - Drishti Jain - PHP UK 2022

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 than their predecessors. They can find a whole range of bugs whilst keeping the false positive rate low. Dave's talk introduces more advanced static analysis. It will show the kinds of bugs that the more advanced static analysis tools can find. He will then look at how they can be added to your current development work flow and he'll finally look at how we can write our code in such a way to get the most out of static analysis.

Practical Advanced Static Analysis - Dave Liddament - PHP UK 2022

Sometimes you need to get information from a website or mobile app and there isn’t a clean, well-documented API providing it. Enter web scraping. Ian goes through some tips and tricks to speed you along your journey.

Levelling Up Your Web Scraping Game - Ian Littman - PHP UK 2022

This talk comes from inheriting a complete, widely used open source PHP API library. It’s complete in that it has a full test suite, but problems arise from the approach of mocking JSON responses to assert tests on. The responses have to be maintained, and that can inevitably lead to false positives if the underlying API changes without the maintainer being notified. You can be clever and use a git submodule to bring in a standardised response that can be used by the same library in other languages, but then you need someone to maintain that across various departments of engineering.

From Betamax to VCR: harden your API integration testing - James Seconde - PHP UK 2022

In tech there are a lot of different people who 'lead' on different things. A mentor when you're joining a new company showing you the ropes of what exists and why thing are the way they are. A CTO responsible for your team's engineering function. A principal engineer working with you on some of the most complex problems. A team's tech lead who might organise some projects and focus on the team's technical direction & execution. An individual in the community who publishes content you find helpful or is responsible for a library you use. An engineering manager who supports you through your development. In this talk Michael will look at what good leadership in tech really means, the different kinds of leaders, how to become a leader in tech, and what great leaders can give you.

Leading in Tech - Michael Cullum - PHP UK 2022

So many people think that pair programming is a boring waste of time and effort. Stacy Cashmore is  here to explain how her team made it work, and what benefits they got out of it! She loves working in a team, bouncing ideas off each other and using their combined strengths to produce something that as individuals they wouldn't be able to come up with. One way she likes to do this is pair programming. Stacy shows you how they went from this sleepy type of pair programming to being super productive when working with multiple developers at one machine! Not the one person working, one person staring into space type of pair programming, but actually providing value to each other, making the extra effort worthwhile, and bringing extra benefits to the team as a whole.

How to really work as a team- from sleepy to strong pair programming - Stacy Cashmore - PHP UK 2022

PHP UK Conference 2023

If an autopilot fails, or a weapon system malfunctions, lives can and will be lost. As a result, significant checks, practices, and concepts go into designing the software for such systems. But the code we, as developers in a wide range of jobs and fields, write can be just as critical - a delayed benefits submission because of a server error causes somebody to become homeless; a mistake on an immigration system causes a family to be deported; a misrouting of a delivery driver causes a car crash.

As developers we should explore the culture around what we build - move fast and break things doesn't work if you're dealing with real people's real lives. Are there lessons of software development, design, project management, that we can learn from "mission critical" software production, and apply to our "normal" development projects that can ultimately save frustration, jobs and even lives in the process?

Your Software is Mission Critical - Mike Lehan

During this presentation, we are going to look at the new features that were introduced in PHP 8.1 and 8.2. Join me to have a look at how the type system is strengthened with Enumerations and "never", Fibers, a new closure syntax, the First Class Callable Syntax, intersection, and disjunctive normal form types, read-only classes, and other smaller features. At the end, you will have a good understanding about all the new and exciting features that are new in PHP 8.1 and PHP 8.2.

What's New in PHP 8.1 and 8.2 - Derick Rethans

Many Git users tend to use Git as a save point, like in a video game; chronologically making checkpoint commits as they go. This spreads out changes to the same areas in the code over several commits, necessitates merging and resolving conflicts, and generally just making an incomprehensible jumble of your history. This talk makes a case for atomic commits and how to use them while only minimally affecting your workflow. Using pre-recorded demos, you’ll learn how to properly interactively rebase, fix up, reset, bisect, and more. By the end of the talk, you’ll have seen how this Git flow will make your life easier and how it will affect your ability to cherry pick, drop unwanted commits, and most importantly: not spend hours resolving conflicts in rebase hell. A little change in habits can go a very long way!

IS NOW Git Legit - Pauline Vos

You've started a new job. As you dig deeper into the codebase, the WTFs per minute rate rapidly increases, and you're left wondering... 'Where do I start?!'. In this talk, I'll draw on my own experiences of joining several different teams to help maintain their legacy codebase. You'll come out of this talk with a better understanding of when you should or should not refactor existing code, the importance of communication, documentation, testing, and ideas for automated tests and checks.

Living the Best Life on a Legacy Project - James Titcumb

In this session Paul is going to share with you his tips & tricks learned when building top quality CI pipelines for large organizations such as the UK Government, banks and the private sector. Using Continuous Integration already? Whether you're a beginner or CI ninja, you'll gain value from this session as we cover a broad range of topics. We'll look at how we can leverage tools like Docker, Jenkins, AWS to truly push CI pipelines to the limit. After this session you'll walk away with new ideas, new tools and lots of real-world experience, to set you on your way.

Continuous Integration: Tips & Tricks - Paul Dragoonis

There are so many benefits from code review; lower development costs, increased code quality, quick up-skilling, and onboarding of team members. Despite these benefits, many teams don’t have code review as part of their process at all. Others don’t get the gains they should from it.

This talk first outlines the business case for code review. It then explores how to make code review effective, specifically looking at:
- Expectations of what can be achieved with code review.
- What should be covered by code review (including example code)
- What should not be covered by code review
- How to write code that makes code review easy
- What makes good code review comments
- What makes good responses to code review comments

Finally, to wrap up you'll be shown how to enable a code review with Github. Spoiler alert: It can be done in under 5 mins!

Effective Code Review - Dave Liddament

Kubernetes makes it easy to deploy, manage and monitor your cloud native applications. Security can be a challenge in such a dynamic, containerised environment, though. Ensuring that your containers are not containing vulnerabilities is vital throughout the complete supply chain, from development and CI through deployment and admission controls to security at runtime. 

In this talk you will see how NeuVector, the first Open-Source Cloud Native Security solution can secure the complete software development lifecycle and even protects against unknown or unpatched vulnerabilities with its zero-trust runtime security model.

Protect against unknown security vulnerabilities - Bastian Hofmann

What happens when you just ride the wave? How productive can we be when we smother our project in all that Symfony goodness? Let's explore some Rapid Application Development practices that Symfony has to offer. We'll acquire the mindset needed and get ourselves familiar with a Symfony setup by the book. We will develop an MVP using the MakerBundle and we'll close the gap towards an MLP using Symfony UX. Live demo included.

Symfony is RAD - Rick Kuipers

APIs are everywhere. Some companies sell theirs and publish documentation alongside it. Others expose just enough APIs to provide value to the end users through a website or app without ever intending them to be used for any other purpose. Your API is the purveyor to some valuable data, and attackers are eager to get at it. This session will cover some of the methods attackers use to reverse engineer your API and some steps you can take to thwart them. 

The session will begin by demonstrating a few methodologies on how traffic to an API can be "sniffed" and analyzed. We will then discuss authentication with API keys and OAuth2 and the differences and pitfalls of each. We'll touch on some low hanging fruit on hardening your API: TLS encryption, certificate pinning, and some less obvious techniques including HMAC request signing, obfuscation, compilation protection, and more. 

At the end of the session you'll have a better understanding of the cat and mouse game that is API security, the knowhow of the tools and techniques attackers might be using to get at your data, and some steps you can implement to better your API's security.

Attackers want your data and they're getting it from your API - Tim Bond

Level: Intermediate/Advanced

Do you wish that PHP had features that other languages have? Have you got some great ideas about how to extend PHP’s feature set but don’t want to go through the RFC process? Great news. There is another way. It is possible to implement some new language features using static analysis. 

This talk will briefly introduce the PHP Language Extension library which offers features such as Java’s package level visibility and C  ’s friend feature. Then, we’ll take a deep dive into how to create a custom PHPStan rule. By the end of the talk, hopefully you’ll be inspired to create your own enhancements to PHP, or at the very least have a starting point to write your own custom rules.

Extending the PHP Language with Static Analysis- Dave Liddament

Your career can feel like it is taking all the energy you have inside of you. You’re dreading the next working day, and you keep wondering if this is what you are going to do for the rest of your life. But what if it isn't? What if you find a job that makes you feel like you are on top of the world, all while being productive as well? 

During my talk I will share the lessons I have learned after changing my career, what the points are you need to take into consideration when making such a decision, and how this actually resembles climbing a mountain very well.

Stories from a career dropout - Femke Buijs

As developers we assume the responsibility of planning, architecting, building and maintaining our individual patches of cyberspace. Our codebases are the landscape of our virtual cities and this landscape must be cared for. From the perspective of a geography graduate turned software engineer, let's explore the parallels that exist between the built environment we inhabit and the virtual environment we are creating.

We built this city... The geographies of software development - Naomi Gotts

Level: Beginner

What's the difference between service location and dependency injection? Why is this dependency injection thing such a big deal anyway, and how do you use that tool correctly? I'll answer these questions and more, including real-world examples of refactoring an application toward the more explicit, testable, closer-to-SOLID applications.

Dependency Injection for Mere Humans - Ian Littman

Do you think the PHP interpreter is black magic and C is just like alchemy for you? Are you interested in harnessing some of that magic for yourself? This talk will give you an overview of how to develop an extension for PHP using rust. You’ll see how to setup up a simple example and how to add more elaborate features to it. After getting to know some general tips you’ll learn about some pitfalls and how to circumvent them. Equipped with this knowledge you’ll be able to work some of that PHP interpreter magic yourself.

Your first PHP extension - Christian Rades

Programming is passion and vocation for many developers, but sometimes you find yourself in a job situation that destroys your love for coding – it happens to the best of us and makes you question everything. This talk is about how I bugfixed my career and regained contentment and meaning in my work. I will pass on lessons I learned on how to protect yourself from false loyalty, get out of a job you once loved, take calculated risks and find your own field of passion.

Bugfixing your career - Diana Scharf

PHP has added more and more types in the last couple of versions. But what is the meaning of a type, a type system, and a subtyping relation? In this talk, we will explain those words, and see what comprises the PHP type system, how it checks for types, how it uses and implements Liskov's Subtitution Principle (LSP) for it's subtyping relation, and how the strict_type declare affects PHP's type system.

PHP's type system dissected? - George  Peter Banyard

You code the app. You've used Test-Driven-Development for it, because you do things the right way. You care about the quality of your code. You ship it. The job is mostly done! EXCEPT, of course, now that your app has -you know, users- performance is down. You've got a Redis instance caching sessions and database queries, but it's not enough! Your problem needs a bolted-on solution - maybe throw something else at it, like Varnish? We don't do Performance-Driven-Development in PHP, and we should. The problem is in the code, not the caching. In this session I'm going to show you how it's done.

What is Performance Driven Development and why aren't you doing it? - James Seconde

You’ve probably heard stories about the Rust programming language, and you’re probably wondering why it’s becoming so popular. In this talk, you’ll see what Rust is from a PHP developer’s perspective. Get ready for a live-coding session, where we are going to recreate an existing PHP application in Rust, from scratch, and demystify all the awesomeness behind it.

Rust For PHP Developers - Nuno Maduro

Reader, be aware: this is not a blockchain talk! The web we knew and loved has become a massive machine led by a small number of tech giants, controlling your data, hogging money, and burning the planet. Tech thought leaders and pioneers recognize the state of the current web for what it is: unsustainable. Find out in this talk which inspiring technologies lie ahead for us, that will help us take back control of our beloved web.

The bright and exciting future of the decentralized web - Pauline Vos

Level: Intermediate

At re:invent 2018, Amazon released custom runtime support and Layers for their Lambda function-as-a-service runtime. With this release, the fact that the company still doesn't have an official PHP Lambda runtime becomes more or less irrelevant, since we as developers can create our own without undue overhead. 

This talk will show you how Lambda custom runtimes work, how to build one that speaks PHP, and how to use pre-built custom runtime layers for either one-off job processing or behind a load balancer or API Gateway to serve web traffic with extreme infrastructure elasticity.

PHP on Lambda with Custom Runtimes - Ian Littman

Level: Intermediate

Reading and writing files locally comes with many nuances and difficulties. It becomes even more complex when files are hosted on external servers like SFTP, AWS S3, Azure, and other providers. Flysystem provides an abstraction layer between an application and interacting with the filesystems. Explore how to use Flysystem Adapters for seamless file management for writing, reading, moving, copying, deleting, and other file interactions. See how to set permissions, configure adapters, get file information, stream files, write unit tests, and more in this technical dive into file management with Flysystem.

Filesystem Management with Flysystem - Mark Niebergall

As a Software Developer, we’re expected to inhale new technologies from the latest libraries within our core programming languages to the latest cloud deployment platform, from programming the smart lights to the latest security enhancements of ipv6. Most recently I’m diving into a new backend technology and I invite you to join me as I hack my way to understanding. I will provide specific examples, from using an IDE to knowing when to give yourself a break so you can return energized and focused, and conclude with practical recommendations as you dive into your next new technology.

Diving Into New Technologies: Hacks to Work More Efficiently- Rain Leander

Level: Beginner

Assuming little or no existing knowledge of Docker, we will learn how to build images of our applications and run them locally as containers.

We will also look at how to orchestrate multiple containers using Docker Compose, with some tips and tricks for typical local development workflows.

Docker for development - Ciaran McNulty

Since Drupal 8 and the big migration to Symfony components, the Drupal community has progressively moved away from some of its custom tools and habits, opening up to more standard practices in the PHP and open source ecosystems. Let’s take a look at what was accomplished, which ‘drupalisms’ remain, and what the future will bring.

Bye bye drupalisms! Propelling Drupal into a modern PHP ecosystem - Marine Gandy

PHP UK Conference 2024

PHP is a truly amazing language. You probably use PHP to create beautiful websites and services in an expressive way. But the language is capable of so much more than what you'll probably program in your day to day job. In this entertaining talk, we'll take a look a couple of surprising ways to use PHP. You'll see lesser known functionality being used such as weak maps and process control functions. We'll also cover a couple amazing open source PHP projects that have borrowed inspiration from communities outside of PHP such as Tailwind and Phoenix. After this talk you'll be even more convinced how truly flexible PHP. You'll also have learned a couple of functions and packages that you can use in your next project.

Fantastic functions and where to find them - Freek Van der Herten

Have you ever wanted to write a desktop application? Using existing tools? Even with PHP?

Well this talk is for you! Let me show you NativePHP - a Laravel Package that allows you to create desktop applications with PHP code. You can make use of native system APIs, clipboard access and more!

Building desktop apps with PHP - Marcel Pociot

In 1905, the Spanish philosopher George Santayana famously wrote the line 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' Like death and taxes, nothing can escape this inevitability. And so, the same is true of API evolution. We're going on a journey.

Awful APIs: A History Lesson in Painful Industry Mistakes - Jim Seconde

The objective of this tutorial is to get an overview of writing tests for a PHP extension, how to implement new functions/methods and how one can use some internal object hooks to create functionality which is not available to normal classes.

How to contribute to PHP - Gina Banyard

How are you supposed to organise your models in an MVC application? What goes where? What is a service class, a mapper or an entity? Domain Driven Design focusses on modelling the domain logic and helps us to map the business requirements to our software. We'll discuss the terminology and take a look at what Domain Driven Design is and see how you use it to provide the model logic for your application decoupling it from your controllers. By the end of this session you will be equipped to create excellent, maintainable models in your application.

An introduction to DDD - Rob Allen

Test doubles (a.k.a. “mocks”) managed to gain a bad reputation over the years for causing unreadable and hard-to-maintain tests. Years of misuse led to some programmers advising against test doubles. Even though they are fundamental in the London school of Test Driven Development.
In this talk, Jakub will go back to the origins of the technique to explain scenarios when it's best used and look at common pitfalls. We’ll discuss various types of test doubles based on examples and show how to make them trustworthy. The key to success, as it turns out, will be a combination of contract (role) and collaboration tests.

Your tests are mocking you - Jakub Zalas

Started in 2017, Bref is an open-source project that helps run PHP serverless on AWS. Today, Bref is used by thousands of companies and handles over 10 billion requests and jobs each month.

But how does it really work? Not just the 'hello world' demo where we take a basic Symfony or Laravel app and deploy it with a few commands. I invite you to lift the hood and understand how Bref runs PHP, how AWS Lambda scales, how it runs on servers and their data centers down to the bare metal. A compilation of public information, as well as experiences and surprises encountered while maintaining Bref over the past 6 years.
If serverless has always been vague or confusing to you, it will no longer be magical after this.

Serverless PHP: how does it really work? - Matthieu Napoli

At some point of your career you'll probably end up working on a majorly outdated version of a framework and prehistoric version of PHP. After months of whinging to the management that it really is time to upgrade, your wish is granted! You've got to take a creaking codebase to the future, or, at least the present. But how best to achieve this?

This talk tells the story of upgrading a Laravel 4 project to Laravel 9. I'll share the things we did well, and the lessons that we learnt along the way.

Regardless of framework and versions, this talk gives practical advice for planning and executing a major upgrade.

Elevating Legacy: A Case Study on the migration from Laravel 4 to 9 - Dave Liddament

Have you ever sweated away for months and finally achieved 100% coverage, but your customers still complained about bugs? Do you never feel satisfied that you can fully rely on your tests, even though you have data providers with all sorts of weird values in them? Are you certain that at least one test would fail if you introduced an error into any given line of code in the codebase? Do you have less than 100% confidence in your test suite?

How can you be sure that the code your colleague wants to merge to `main` via the `super-new-feature-branch` is adequately tested beyond the ‘coveralls’ report?

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide To Mutation Testing - Neal Brooks

A relational database has long been the go-to choice for PHP application developers, but as applications grow the data doesn’t always fit the relational model. Perfect normalised data structures have their place, but in the world of rapid delivery, cloud computing & microservices developers need more in their toolbox.

This talk looks at when you might want to try a different data store, and how you’d look to build out or migrate to a new service. We’ll look at queues, key-value, document stores primarily (with some specific examples in Amazon DynamoDB, MongoDB and Redis). We’ll also look at some emerging database types such as graphs and ledgers.

Beyond Relational: Data storage for modern applications - Mike Lehan

Writing a third-party integration would be impossible without API documentation and yet we continue to push it down our list of priorities or we create half-baked solutions that become immediately out of date.

In this talk we take a look at Scribe, a powerful package for Laravel that generates human-readable API documentation right from our code.

The talk will include a live demo of how to create documentation from an existing project.

Documenting Laravel APIs - James Brooks

Burnout today is one of the biggest problems in the industry, as studies show, the industry is evolving and trying to solve this problem using things like emotional salary or other types of incentives that allow us to have a better work-life balance. But the question that arises is, is there something else we could do that would somehow reduce burnout or at least try? In this talk we are going to see how Extreme Programming done well could help improve your quality of life at work and why. Going from what's XP, how each of the values, principles, and practices are related to each other, and how they could be a tool for us and our companies.

Improving your life with Extreme Programming - Emmanuel Valverde Ramos

Generative AI in 2024 has a consent problem. Scraped and otherwise stolen datasets are used to produce output that can directly compete with the people who generated the source data. This doesn’t have to be our future. The Common Voice project collects volunteer donated speech data to freely offer academics, industry and language activists a future where meaningful linguistic diversity is built into the digital products and services that increasingly fill our world. By teaching computers the way that real people speak, Common Voice doesn’t just offer a better connected future for global users, but presents us with one possible consent led model for community driven data collection. Together, let’s explore how community led dataset collection, design and governance structures have developed across speech datasets and look at how freely donated data, data trusts and other consent led collection models could offer a less dystopian AI future. An exploratory look at the proliferation of consent led data collection models in speech datasets, looking not only at Common Voice's CC0 donation-led approach but also looking into how data collection and governance models that offer more granular data control (like language community led data trusts) could offer AI and all of us touched by AI a less dystopian path into the future.

Community Driven Data Collection and Consent in AI - Jessica Rose

There are no secret tricks or shortcuts to leveling up in your career: talent and hard work are still the main recipes for success. But in terms of mindset, there are some things that can make a difference. And while I don’t claim to know all the answers, I’d like to share 10 tips that helped me in my career. In this keynote I’ll cover topics like passion, expression, communication, perception, patience, empathy, risk & creativity. While the title makes it look like a Buzzfeed-style article, these 10 tips & tricks are a guideline in a series of stories I’ll share with you. Take from it what you want. No success guaranteed though. And no refunds! 😉

10 things that helped me advance my career - Thijs Feryn

During this presentation, we are going to look at the new features that were introduced in PHP 8.3, and some in earlier versions. Join me to have a look at how the type system is strengthened with Typed Class Constants, Readonly Classes, Arbitrary Static Variable Initialisers, Overloaded Method Markers, and other new smaller features and clean-ups.

At the end you will have a good understanding about all the new and exciting features that are part of the PHP 8.3 release.

Videos

Fantastic functions and where to find them - Freek Van der Herten

Building desktop apps with PHP - Marcel Pociot

Awful APIs: A History Lesson in Painful Industry Mistakes - Jim Seconde

How to contribute to PHP - Gina Banyard

An introduction to DDD - Rob Allen

Your tests are mocking you - Jakub Zalas

Serverless PHP: how does it really work? - Matthieu Napoli

Elevating Legacy: A Case Study on the migration from Laravel 4 to 9 - Dave Liddament

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide To Mutation Testing - Neal Brooks

Beyond Relational: Data storage for modern applications - Mike Lehan

Documenting Laravel APIs - James Brooks

Improving your life with Extreme Programming - Emmanuel Valverde Ramos

Community Driven Data Collection and Consent in AI - Jessica Rose

10 things that helped me advance my career - Thijs Feryn

What's New in PHP 8.3 - Derick Rethans

Boosting Web Engagement with Symfony UX - Mathéo Daninos

Alias WP-CLI - Milana Cap

Microservices vs The Distributed Monolith - Chris Riley

Pairing, Sharing, Caring - One team's journey to Pair Programming - Mark Bradley

The Business of Bisecting - Pauline Vos

Cutting-Edge Continuous Integration with Dagger - Paul Dragoonis

Boosting Frontend Speed: Quick Wins for Backend Developers - Paul Conroy

How much database abstraction do I need? - Alexander M. Turek

Where No PHP Has Gone Before - David Flanagan

Tuning PHPStan to Maximum Strictness - Ondřej Mirtes

Videos

Fantastic functions and where to find them - Freek Van der Herten

Building desktop apps with PHP - Marcel Pociot

Awful APIs: A History Lesson in Painful Industry Mistakes - Jim Seconde

How to contribute to PHP - Gina Banyard

An introduction to DDD - Rob Allen

Your tests are mocking you - Jakub Zalas

Serverless PHP: how does it really work? - Matthieu Napoli

Elevating Legacy: A Case Study on the migration from Laravel 4 to 9 - Dave Liddament

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide To Mutation Testing - Neal Brooks

Beyond Relational: Data storage for modern applications - Mike Lehan

Documenting Laravel APIs - James Brooks

Improving your life with Extreme Programming - Emmanuel Valverde Ramos

Community Driven Data Collection and Consent in AI - Jessica Rose

10 things that helped me advance my career - Thijs Feryn

What's New in PHP 8.3 - Derick Rethans

Boosting Web Engagement with Symfony UX - Mathéo Daninos

Alias WP-CLI - Milana Cap

Microservices vs The Distributed Monolith - Chris Riley

Pairing, Sharing, Caring - One team's journey to Pair Programming - Mark Bradley

The Business of Bisecting - Pauline Vos

Cutting-Edge Continuous Integration with Dagger - Paul Dragoonis

Boosting Frontend Speed: Quick Wins for Backend Developers - Paul Conroy

How much database abstraction do I need? - Alexander M. Turek

Where No PHP Has Gone Before - David Flanagan

Tuning PHPStan to Maximum Strictness - Ondřej Mirtes

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