London PHP Conference

The 9th Annual PHP UK conference is over! Lots of people, a very posh venue, great food and very efficient and friendly organizers: Johanna Cherry, Sam Bell and Ciarán Rooney. What else do you need at the London PHP conference? Possibly some talks! I am told they were very good.

The conference was divided into 3 tracks, 27 world-wide known speakers and of course some beer events at the local pubs and Friday evening gathering in the exhibition hall.

For key notes we had:

• What Makes Technology Work by Juozas ‘Joe’ Kaziukenas – compared making wooden chairs to building apps
• The Future of PHP is in the Cloud by Glen Campbell – reviewed some of the key developments in PHP over the last few years and outlined how PHP can keep pace with the explosive growth of the cloud.

Some interesting talks included :

• PHP in Space by Derick Rethans – how PHP can be used for all kinds of terrestrial and non-terrestrial purposes … Expect trigonometry and other maths, and rocket science/explosions! It feels that it should have been great fun to attend this talk.

• Debugging HTTP by Lorna Mitchell –  Curl, Wireshark and Charles, the tools you will want to have at hand. Most of the comments are “great talk, will be using Charles…”. I have a very special relationship with Lorna as she helps me marketing her book PHP Web Services to her audience. Well done Lorna!
• PHP at the Firehose Scale by Stuart Herbert – Here’s one to give the PHP bashers a well-deserved black eye! Twitter is one of the world’s best know social media sites, handling over 500 million public tweets a day (that’s around 6,000 tweets a second). How do they do it? With the help of PHP of course.

Other activities:

• If suffering from an information overdose and wanted to relax, you could then go to THE CLOUD BAR (Presented by Engine Yard) – for an awesome chill out space, free swag, free coffee, and free info about everything cloud.
• Or if feeling full of energy, you could join the HACKATHON (Presented by JetBrains) – alongside the main tracks and late into Friday night using Sochi Winter Olympics API data. Prizes were awarded throughout the Hackathon for the most innovative hacks including two free tickets to next year’s conference, PHP Storm licenses and more.

Make a note in your diary for the 10th London PHP Conference which I am sure will be even more awesome.