PHP Central Europe 2018 conference took place in picturesque capital of Czech Republic — Prague. In fact it was the very first PHP CE conference outside of Poland. Right after we reached out destination we hit the city center. Besides sightseeing and tasting local cuisine we visited Apple museum. It was definitely worth spending a few Czech Crowns to saw a part of unbelievable history of Mac and iPhone evolution.
Spread the PHP joy
During the official opening we were reminded conference’s history and raising number of participants with each year. Damien Seguy was a first speaker and shared a very enjoyable story of how official PHP mascot — the ElePHPant — was made and how it has travelled around the world.
His idea we liked a lot was to take the ElePHPand everywhere you go to share it with other people and do exactly the same with your PHP knowledge.
Next presentation worth mentioning was about image classification in PHP using neutral networks. Speech was based on deep level of understanding of PHP code and a lot of linear algebra examples. For a moment we felt like students at University again. Interesting fact mentioned was that GPU calculations enable to perform fast neutral network learning with good results in pure PHP language.
Another session we found meaningful was Sebastian Grodzicki speaking about profiling PHP. He presented a lot of examples how performance monitoring can be handled and showed lot of measures based on blackfire.io explaining how to interpret results. Next speech was about Doctrine and its usages. We enjoyed examples of DQL and results showed live.
Why you need PHP upgrade?
The highlight of the conference was Rasmus Lerdorf’s speech. Everyone were waiting for PHP language creator, author of the first two PHP versions and active PHP core contributor to enter the stage. Rasmus shared a lot of his insights on PHP language, its history and development. What has changed over the years and what will change in 7.4 version and the next ones. He strongly encouraged us all to save the power (the earth and its resources!) by upgrading to PHP version 7.3. It is faster, takes much less of the CPU usage and consumes less energy by servers room. It was very meaningful and we agree with him.
Safety first
Christopher Riley’s presentation about software security was full of examples how we can prevent cyber attacks and code bugs that led to real threat to society in the past like nuclear explosions or plane crashes. Safety should be a priority in building any kind of software and Christopher focused on achieving high safety level in applications written by developers. Last but not least he talked about avoiding mistakes made in the past.
The most interesting speaker from the second day was Gabriel Caruso from Brazil. Gabriel talked about strict programming and showed ways to write even better cleaner code and how it can be successfully tested. He explained ways to improve even old legacy code with not such big amount of time and money. Finally he showed a few examples how equals operators work in PHP in „funny” and curious way.
We love PHP world
PHP Central Europe Conference was intense. We had an opportunity to listen to interesting lectures, chat with people from around the world and share experience about PHP language and everyday work with it in different frameworks.
No doubt we gained a valuable knowledge about PHP during this exciting weekend in Prague. For us PHP is not only the coding language, it’s a part of our lives and we’ll continue this journey.