PHP UK Conference In London

As you might be aware, the UK PHP Conference was held in London last weekend. Having been the lucky winner of a ticket from PHP NW I went along.

The Venue

The conference was held in The Brewery in London city centre, a well suited conference centre with a variety of different conference rooms. An old Whitbread brewery, it was modern and practical while still maintaining enough of its history to keep its character. Overall the venue was great and it was good to have the variety of different rooms for all of the different events

The talks

The talks on offer were on a wide variety of subjects, varying from the very specific libraries to things of use to any PHP developer. Each of the talks was led by a volunteer giving up their time to speak about a subject for which they held a passion, it came across very well and as ever is good to hear from active members of the community.

Talks I found to be of particular interest were

• The Future of the PHP Development Environment A practical introduction to Vagrant, demonstrating its purpose in creating a reliable, predictable server environment. Covered was the installation, configuration and use of the software
• OpenStreetMap for the Web An enthusiastic demonstration of the power of having openly accessible data of the world’s maps and the APIs which enable a plethora of different applications
• A Hands-On Introduction to Writing Unit Tests Using PHPUnit A very practical (with live coding and demonstration of the Unit Tests, a risky move that paid off) intro to unit tests in PHP. Aimed at the very beginner, it started slowly with very simple tests but showed the power of them in much bigger projects

In summary

I thoroughly enjoyed the day, and would recommend anyone wanting to attend in future. The talks will be posted on the PHP UK website in the coming weeks so you should be able to get a sample of the events there