I attended my first ever PHP conference yesterday, PHP South Coast. I must say, I had a great time, not only were people very welcoming, but the talks were also extremely good. The talks I attended are as follows:
- Keynote: Cal Evans
- Parallel PHP: Joe Watkins
- The Art of Programming: Erika Heidi
- Teaming up Backbone.js and the new WordPress API: Jeroen van Dijk
- API Pain Points: Phil Sturgeon
- Dependency injection, the right way: Dan Ackroyd
- Database version control without pain?: Harrie Verveer
Stand out talks for me were by Cal, Jeroen, Phil and Harrie, although all were thoroughly enjoyable. I wish I had some pictures to share but unfortunately I was paying too much attention to the actual content of the talks to remember to take some, you will be able to see some at #phpsc15 I’m sure.
Cal’s opening keynote was extremely powerful and emotive. He spoke about the need for a community and how communities, like living organisms, can thrive and fail based upon small changes. Getting involved in the PHP community is something that I’ve always wanted to do, going as far as trying to set up PHPCornwall. Due to lack of time, I’ve never got that into it but this talk has really given me the push I need to get bits sorted. PHPCornwall will be a thing soon, I promise!
Jeroen’s talk on Teaming up Backbone.js and the new WordPress API really got me thinking about what we can actually do with WordPress. I’ve already used the WP-API for a few things but always to power websites. The thought of powering a native application with it had only recently been mentioned to me but after seeing this talk it makes perfect sense. WordPress is an extremely powerful system and teamed up with the WP-API it seems that there’s no reason we can’t use it as a pre-built data store for other things we need!
Phil’s talk on API Pain Points was another good overview of what he goes over in his book Build API’s You Won’t Hate. This book was a saviour to me when building an internal API recently and I encourage anyone who has to build an API to read it. Whilst the talk didn’t really cover any new material if you’ve read the book, it was good to see the man himself in action. My only regret was not grabbing him at some point to say thank you. There’s always next time I suppose!
Harrie’s talk on Database version control without pain was probably one I was most interested in before the conference as it’s always been a massive annoyance for me. Harrie started off talking about his search for the silver bullet in DB Version Control, only to find out that there isn’t one and that the methodology you use is down to what you and your team feel most comfortable using. Whilst disappointing to know it’ll still be a pain, he showed some great tools for helping with the management and some methodologies I had never come across before. It was a very thought provoking talk.
Maybe I’ll write up a bit more about this at a later date but for now I’m going to go and do some more playing with the WP-API!
