This year's conference season started last week with the PHPBenelux Conference. We sponsored the coffee, a sponsoring most developers appreciate a lot.
It was the first time I attended this conference and it will definitely not be the last.
It's one of the most fun events I've been at. The social event on the first evening was just stunning. There were a lot of activities one could fool around with like playing darts, tabletop football, jenga and even a surf board simulator.
Not to forget they also provided delicious fries and Belgium beer. But the most important aspect of any conference are the people and the so called "hallway track". I met a bunch of old and new friends there and had great conversations.
I also had the chance to meet Rafael Dohms in person. Rafael carried around a prototype of the AmsterdamPHP ElePHPant that we are supporting as a HERO sponsor.
Talks
I just want to mention a few talks I attended and found valuable.
Low-Level PHP, Getting things done with Go, by my friend Benjamin Eberlei from the Qafoo Team:
Benjamin gave a brief introduction into the go programming language. After his talk I felt temped to rewrite my json API endpoints in go.
Decorating Applications with Stack by Beau D. Simensen:
Beau explained the ideas behind composing HttpKernelInterface middlewares and the stack project. Shopware is HttpKernelInterface compatible since version 4.2.
Say What? Ubiquitous Language and You!, also by Beau:
In this talk Beau showed how important Ubiquitous Language is to implement Domain-Driven Design.
High Performance PHP by Anthony Ferrara:
With Anthony we did a deep dive into the PHP internals. He explained Ahead of Time (AOT) and different types of Just In Time (JIT) compilers and how these are used in Recki-CT and HHVM to speed PHP up.
The future of PHP by Sara Golemon:
As a Facebook employee, Sara is one of the lead developers of HHVM. In her talk she talked about the feature of PHP, the Performance improvements we can expect from PHPNG and HHVM and how the PHP ecosystem is getting more powerful.
To get an impression of the atmosphere I recommend you to watch the official after movie:
#phpbnl15 after movie (rough edit) from PHPBenelux on Vimeo.
Looking forward
The next conferences you can find me or my colleagues from the development team my are the PHP UK Conference in London, the eCommerceCamp in Jena and the PHP Unconference Europe at Palma de Mallorca.
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