Tag: conference

My PHP Traits talk at PHPBenelux Conference 2012

This weekend (27-28 January 2012) I spoke again at the PHPBenelux Conference and what a sweet conference this is.
An excellent line-up, great organizing and a wonderful networking opportunity. You should attend in 2013, if you are still doubting here are the reasons what made 2012 so special.

Purpose of the entry

Writing about this conference makes my heart jump and grin from ear to ear. I am obliged to write about this event just to vent all the positive feelings I have about this conference. I hope I will be able to give you just a taste of what I am feeling.

Overview

  • What is #phpbnl12?
  • My talk PHP traits, treat or threat
  • Who was attending?
  • Pros and Cons of this year
  • Conclusion

What is #phpbnl12?

The PHPBenelux Conference is a two day event organized by PHPBenelux which is a non profit PHP usergroup oranization for the Benelux. They organize meetings and conferences for PHP developers and companies using PHP. These events contain technical talks, workshops and best-practice sessions to share and improve the knowledge among developers. And that is exactly what this yearly conference is about: workshops, best-practices and sharing knowledge among developers.
This year was the third installment of many more to come and was perfectly organized by the PHPBenelux Crew (professionalism for the win).
They managed to get together an excellent schedule full with talks ranging from beginner to advanced. Found some killer sponsors which in turn threw some spectacular after socials. Ibuildings organized a Belgian beer tasting – without the spit-bucket, so you can imagine how that went 😀 – and combined that with real Belgian fries. They tasted soooooo good. You had the opportunity to play the Kinect but also could get your hands dirty on some good old Bowling. I kicked the ass of Derick Rethans, David Zülke, Stefano Oldeman and Jeroen Keppens. Unfortunately got my ass kicked by (the lucky cheating bastard ;)) Juozas Kaziukenas in the last round. That was so exciting 123 – 116. Maybe next year dear reader you can challenge me!
The other great sponsor was Engine Yard (Orchestra) and they arranged a BBQ. Those guys know how to entertain and luckily for me they also thought about the vegetarians. I scored a free Engine Yard scarf – which was needed because it was a blistering cold – and scored couple of drinks from some awesome people.
Talking about these social events is important because a conference is soo much more than learning. Hell there is tons to learn but also tons of interesting people to meet.

My talk PHP traits, treat or threat

This talk is an invitation for you to finally embrace PHP5.4. Normally you should already master all the 5.3 features. Heck it has been around for ages to play around with in production. The stable release of PHP5.4 is just around the corner so you should already have been testing all your apps against it. If you haven’t come and see this talk why. It will throw in some new PHP5.4 features / syntax but will of course mainly focus on traits.

The talk in itself was packed with information based on real world examples. This made the slidedeck sometimes spill with code, which I will filter down to a more readable and thus understanding level (got some complaints about too much code confusing it all). The reason why real world examples are chosen is simple: the attendee gets immediate feedback on how and potentially where to use it. He/She sees the possibilities of the feature instead of some academic foo bar examples, for which they can read the manual on php.net. However even if they are more into academic examples they found my slides and presentation far exceeding that. Lets be honest the manual is lacking a lot of information on what is possible with traits. For this you need to really invest in the mailing lists and talk to the PHP core team. That information is in the slides. The talk doesn’t say traits are the holy grail nor that it is evil, I let the attendee decide. I show what is possible with this new language feature without any judgement, but do focus on some best practices and pitfalls.

Some quotes:

  • I think Nick did a great job and I learnt a lot of new stuff.
  • I liked the fact that it was “real code” and not just hello world examples.
  • I really enjoyed this talk. Really looking forward to give 5.4 a try 🙂
  • This was a talk I was really looking forward to. Nick did a good job at explaining traits.
  • Very interesting talk; I learned a lot of new stuff and I’m definitely going to play around with traits a bit more
PHP traits, treat or threat?

Who was attending?

Approximately 300 attendees with the “open source state of mind” at heart joined the conference. People who love to learn or lecture on everything programming related. It is about so much more than PHP. I urge you to join even if you are programming into a different language like .net or java. There is a wealth on information at this event and you feel the positive vibe of each and every attendee. The sponsors gave away some cool gifts too. ibuildings gave several tickets to DPC12 -another high rated conference- and an iPad2. Enrise raffled several Zend exam vouchers and an Apple Macbook Air (how f* awesome is that??).

Pros and cons this year

Pro:

  • As always excellent venue
  • lots to learn at great lectures
  • lots of awesome people who are happy to meet you
  • sponsored conference social drinks at the hotel => FREE DRINKS for everyone.
  • the food really went up a notch this year. This year warm meals were also available and they were Yummie.

Con:

  • 2 small rooms and 1 main room doesn’t cut it anymore for this conference. At times some of the small rooms were packed. I had to stand at some presentations and during my talk people litterly sat on the floor. I do not know the proportions, but if the room at a seat capacity of 100, then at least 40 extra sat on the floor in front of the chairs.

Closing notes

Great value for money and in general a conference you should attend, no excuses.
See you next year at The PHPBenelux Conference 2013

Thx for reading and feel free to comment,
Nick Belhomme

Mastering Namespaces in PHP at PHPBenelux Conference

On Saturday 29th January I held my Mastering Namespaces in PHP presentation at the PHPBenelux Conference. The second edition of this awesome conference has put the conference on the European map as a classic must-go-to. The ratings are through the roof!

See what attendees are saying:

  • “already the best conference of the year”
  • “Great conference! The best i had in years.”
  • “5 THUMBS UP!!”
  • “Top class speakers, which make a good schedule”

I must say I am really happy I was part of making all those people have a wonderful day by giving the Mastering Namespaces in PHP Presentation which was – although for some people lacking some colour in the black and white slides – regarded very good:

  • “Spot on. All aspects of namespaces were covered, and explained well. Included with examples & references”
  • “The subject was well covered, and Nick clearly knew what he was talking about.”
  • “Good presentation about namespaces! Good explanation about how it works, some pitfalls and best practices. I liked it a lot!”
  • “Clear introduction into Namespacing in PHP with the good and bad clearly outlined. Very informative and thorough.”
Mastering Namespaces in PHP

To all the people who attended and took the time to rate my presentation at joind.in a big thanks,

See you next time
Nick Belhomme

Dutch PHP Conference 2010 (#dpc10)

P1070099P1070098P1070068P1070065P1070064P1070056P1070047P1070043P1070100
More Photographs / enlarge

Purpose of the entry

For those who don’t know me, I always do a small write-up on each conference I attend (it is to persuade all you non-attendees to be there next year and maybe say hello).
This write-up will be on an incredible event packed with lots of interesting topics, relaxing atmosphere, interesting people to meet AND goodies to win. In short the Dutch PHP Conference. And this year it got even better.

Overview

  • What is #dpc10?
  • Yes! I spoke at the Dutch PHP Conference
  • Who was attending?
  • Pros and Cons of this year
  • Conclusion

What is #dpc10?

The Dutch PHP Conference is an event organized by ibuildings and spans 3 full days.
One tutorial day and 2 conference days. Generally the talks cover the more advanced PHP related topics. This year was the fourth installment of many more to come and was hosted by Lorna Jane Mitchell.
Compared to the previous years there was a new feature: the Uncon organized by PHPBenelux. The uncon is a less formal main stage at the conference where beginning and experienced speakers can bring their topics under public attention. You get requested the same day to speak in a certain time slot or you can volunteer to talk. If accepted your name will be listed next to the main speakers topics.

Yes! I spoke at the Dutch PHP Conference

I spoke about the good practice on separating different responsibilities of your application. It focused on

  • a model is NOT your database
  • how models retrieve results in the form of collections and entities from your Data Access Object (Dao, this might be
    the database logic or a web service).
  • Why it is a good idea to implement using a factory (or even dependency injection) and not hardcode your dao inside each model.
  • Creating a dao interface (contract based design) so that when you want to switch to another implementation, the model requires no change.
  • that with this system (what OOP is all about) you create clear separation and unit testing is made very easy.
  • you promote loose coupling
  • Easy creation of extra layers by the use of decorators

It was a completely unprepared lecture, because it was a “Hi Nick fancy to speak” kind-of-a-thingy. I am glad I accepted because I received very positive feedback and generally people wanted more. You can see the comments on my talk on joind.in

Who was attending?

Approximately 400 attendees with the “open source state of mind” at heart joined the conference. People who love to learn or lecture
on everything programming related. It is about so much more than PHP. I urge you to join even if you are programming into a different language like .net or java. There is a wealth on information at this event and you feel the positive vibe of each and every attendee.
The sponsors gave away some cool gifts too, with Microsoft taking the lead. The raffle included a full week to Las Vegas, an XBox360, programs and much more. Microsoft is really starting to embrace the PHP Community by sponsoring almost each PHP Conference, for which the community is very grateful.

Pros and cons this year

Pro:

  • better stage venue
  • lots to learn at great lectures
  • lots of awesome people who are happy to meet you
  • an awesome feature called uncon sessions which is already fully adopted at United State conferences
  • conference social drink at a local pub sponsored by GitHub => Free drinks for everyone

Con:

  • like every year, the food is a bit disappointing. Prepare yourself to eat very basic sandwiches for 3 days. (The organizers could learn something from PHPUK, they serve awesome food, see my previous post)

Closing notes

Great value for money and in general a conference you should attend, no excuses.
See you next year at The Dutch PHP Conference 2011 (9-11 June 2011).

Thx for reading and feel free to comment,
Nick Belhomme

Dutch Audience