I had a pleasure to attend phpday.it – biggest PHP focused conference in Italy. The conference was great, I meet a lot of cool people – some of the decision makers for PHP language! Below I am listing the talks that I participated with short description. In few months the recordings of those talks will be available on youtube.

Keynote: The PHP Foundation: Three Years After by Roman Pronskiy from The PHP Foundation

A comprehensive overview of the PHP Foundation’s journey over the past three years. The presentation covered its historical context, current key areas of focus, and exciting future plans. A notable highlight was the announcement regarding FrankenPHP.

Rethinking Server-Side Rendering in Modern PHP Applications by Simone D’Amico from Redokun

This session provided a comparison of Laravel Livewire and Symfony UX, features within the largest PHP frameworks. It explored their ability to enable frontend changes directly from the backend without requiring custom JavaScript, utilizing sockets to deliver UI updates. The approach bears a resemblance to setups employing React and server components, presenting a fascinating technological direction.

Building Really Fast Applications by Tobias Nyholm from Eneba

An insightful presentation emphasizing the principle of “less is more.” The core message was that while overly complex frameworks can sometimes be detrimental, attempting to build everything from scratch might also be counterproductive, making framework usage the more beneficial approach in certain scenarios. Several illustrative examples were provided.

Custom PHPStan Rules: Automate Standards and Save Time by Dave Liddament from Lamp Bristol

We learned how to effectively enforce coding standards and best practices using custom rules within PHPStan. This sparked an idea for detecting potentially “tainted” code. For instance, adding messages to a queue or saving files to S3 within a database transaction could lead to orphaned files if the transaction is rolled back. I’m exploring the possibility of integrating this detection into PHPStan, either as a custom rule or extension, or potentially as a standalone scanner.

Running PHP-Applications in a Multi-Process Container by Anne-Julia Seitz from QOSSMIC

An informative talk explaining the drawbacks of running multiple services within a single container and the reasons against using tools like Supervisor to manage multiple processes in development environments. The presentation advocated for alternative tool: s6-overlay, which was demonstrated as a more suitable approach.

Async PHP with Coroutines: Building Scalable Applications by Khushboo Verma from Appwrite

A concise introduction to coroutines and the Swoole framework. Swoole was presented as a potential solution to the inherent limitations of PHP’s request-response lifecycle. The talk included compelling examples of handling multiple HTTP calls to external APIs concurrently.

Open Source: from Revolution to Evolution – a software industry metamorphosis by Edoardo Dusi from Storyblok

A presentation highlighting the significance of the Open Source movement, offering a thorough summary of its historical progression. It raised important questions for consideration, such as whether “open source” is a strictly binary concept or if varying degrees of openness exist. Yes, Redis was mentioned.

How to write extensions by Sara Golemon from The PHP Foundation

As the title suggests, this talk demystified the process of writing PHP extensions. It revealed that creating a simple extension is more accessible than commonly perceived. Following this conference, I am considering developing my own PHP extension – so stay tuned!

A slice of PIE: revolutionising PHP extension installation by James Titcumb from Roave

This session introduced a new method for installing PHP extensions. One of PIE’s creators demonstrated its ease of use. Built on Composer, this tool can process a composer.json file to install the necessary extensions seamlessly.

PHP: Particularly Horrible Programs by Gina Peter Banyard from The PHP Foundation

A presentation that showcased many of the quirks existing within the PHP language. Examples like the problematic outcome of attempting to increment a string and the difference between $v++ and $v += 1 were just two of the many less intuitive behaviors highlighted.

OAuth 2.1: The Future of API Security by Rob Allen

An insightful presentation on the current state of OAuth 2.0 and the emerging “2.1” iteration. Once the recording is available, the reason for the quotes around “2.1” will become clear.

10 things that helped me advance my career by Thijs Feryn from Varnish Software

An exceptionally valuable and inspiring talk. It is highly recommended to watch the recording when it becomes available. I can personally attest to implementing some of the discussed concepts in my own life and validating their effectiveness.