The Online PHP Conference

For many years we have been regular speakers at various IT conferences. Now most of the conferences have been postponed to the end of 2020 or are cancelled altogether. An early summer without a PHP conference at all? We thought: that's not possible. So we got creative.

So we are bringing online the talks that we had prepared for this conference season. And so we announce The Online PHP Conference for Tuesday, May 26, 2020, and Wednesday, May 27, 2020. Grab your favorite browser and come by, we invite you to our homes.

Arne will give a half-day workshop before the main conference, on Monday, May 25, 2020. "Secure Authentication for the Web" is an introduction to the W3C standard WebAuthn, which effectively protects logins from phishing attacks. Arne will modernize an existing PHP application with a traditional login to use a secure second factor for authentication. This eliminates the need for passwords and secures the login against various types of attacks. This is a live coding workshop in mob programming style. The presenter's screen will be shared, and participants will not write any code themselves.

Day 1: Slide-less

Stefan will open the conference with the slide-less presentation "Evolution of a Software Architecture". Watch how the architecture of an archetypal example application evolves and changes over time. In each case, we'll discuss what architectural decisions were made and what the consequences were.

"Evolution of a Software Architecture" was already given earlier this year at the PHP User Group Munich, where the talk wowed over 100 attendees. To enable this Slideless format online, we will work with an additional camera showing the drawing area.

After that, Arne will explore the question of how much framework you actually need. This talk will also be slide-less: Arne plans to program a micro-framework live in 45 minutes. Can he do it?

In "Modernizing Legacy Without Fear", our third slide-less presentation, Sebastian will show through live coding how to modernize seemingly untestable code by making the changes incrementally and backing each up with characterization tests. Could it be that modernizing legacy code in this way can actually be fun?

We'll wrap up the first day around lunchtime to give you plenty of time to get some work done in the afternoon, spend time with your family, or try out new ideas while you mentally process the talks.

Already looking forward to the second day? So are we.

Day 2: Experience from the Field

"PHP in 2020: Fully Loaded" will introduce you to PHP 7.4's new preloading mechanism. Preloading not only changes how you load classes, but also when and how you install new versions of them. Arne has spent a lot of time researching the preloading feature. You should definitely not miss finding out how you can use preloading to speed up your application.

On a side note, Arne has also written a chapter on preloading for the next release of our eBook PHP 7 Explained. After a complete rewrite of the manuscript, we are currently in the process of updating the book for PHP 7.4. We currently expect the final version of PHP 7 Explained to be released in the next few weeks.

Next, Stefan will show how to introduce CQRS to legacy applications. Since web applications are usually very read-intensive, they can benefit a lot from handling reads and writes through separate software.

For those who could use a little background on CQRS, check out Stefan's article "Improve your Design with CQRS".

Sebastian will conclude the technical presentations with "Optimizing Your Test Suite". You will learn how to make your PHPUnit test suite much more readable and maintainable.

Just a moment. There's more:

Public Panel Discussion in the Evening

The hallway track is an essential part of any conference. While we can't really hang out with each other in persona, we can still gather around a virtual fireplace, or maybe even a virtual campfire.

Our evening panel discussion, "PHPUnit: A Success Story", is open to the public, but you still need to register to attend.

Sebastian Bergmann, the creator of PHPUnit, will be joined by PHPUnit contributors Arne Blankerts, Andreas Möller, and Ewout Pieter den Ouden. The four will tell why and how they became PHPUnit contributors, and will give us an insight into the new event-based logging system they developed together. This panel will be moderated by Stefan Priebsch. There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions and join the discussion.

Just bring your favorite beverage and join us to get comfortable.

tl;dr

The Online PHP Conference is a two-day online conference with an optional half-day workshop up front.

The conference will take place online on Tuesday, May 26, 2020 and Wednesday, May 27, 2020. We've opted for a leisurely pace and two half days to give you plenty of time to enjoy and absorb the content.

You can attend the entire conference or register for individual presentations:

Our Promise

If you, or we, run into major technical problems that make attending the Online PHP Conference impossible, then we will refund your registration fee.

Stay healthy and take care. We look forward to seeing you online soon.