Exploring Streets Of York and Participation in First Ever PHP Yorkshire conference

When something unbelievable happens, people tend to say “you were in the right place at the right time” that’s why you’re lucky. That is how I feel what happened to me here at Edmonds Commerce Ltd.

Within first few weeks since I started working on Magento projects here at Edmonds. Nolwenn came to me with a question. “Hey Tadas, development team is going to this conference ‘PHP Yorkshire’, they don’t know what to expect, but it will be fun, will you join them?”

And then in my head I am like “Wow, my first weeks and I got this promising opportunity to spend the weekend knowing my colleagues better and listen to these passionate people who loves PHP”. Who could decline such offer? So off we go.

Sunny Friday evening, we are all set and heading to the city of York, which distanced just a bit more than hour from our office in Shipley. Few rounds of everyone’s preferred music requests and here we are, passing the door to explore York after we have left our belongings in the place we stayed overnight.

The night in York or how to know the city centre within 3 pubs

I am not into architecture, but York looked very appealing to me and it was my first time visiting it, definitely not last. I didn’t see any building there which would look out of sync. And the buzz of people on the Friday night was more on the calm side, just the way I like. But let’s move onto the fun stuff. So our first stop was just meters away from the place we stayed where we order some beer and appreciated the moment and the beginning of night.

Then another bar/pub and another. Everyone know how it goes, don’t we? The heading of this part might be too cheesy, you definitely can’t cover all the beauty of York within the distance of 3 pubs, but yeah… York is great and the beer is great too!

The Big Day

So here we are, little bit tired from the night before, but we stood tall in the morning, ready to enjoy our day. I was amazed to be honest, that we were just right on time to begin our conference in the University of York.

So what was this all conference about? 1 day, 2 tracks, 13 experts. So after all, everyone was satisfied with how it ended.

To be honest I enjoyed all of the talks I have participated in but the most memorable to me was about HTML5 API’s, naming things and object calisthenics.

While my colleagues loved the speeches on GIT internals, handling errors gracefully, and they got answered what MySQL 8 is all about and why it is 8 and not any other number and Joseph have even won a MySQL dolphin.

All in all, the weekend was enjoyable, I am glad I had a chance to be there, know my colleagues better and just be inspired by the talks and the community of PHP.

- Tadas