Highlights from PHP Australia Conference

On March, 12th-13th, 200 developers converged on Sydney's Maritime Museum; for Australia's first PHP conference. Whether the excellent venue, or beautiful harbour in which it was held; there was an air of excitement as the conference kicked off. The format was a single track of talks, from a selection of excellent speakers. Many travelled, from all over the world, to share their development experiences with the delegates.

Some of the more notable speakers were Rasmus Lerdorf, Michael Widenius and Jordi Boggiano: the creators of PHP, MySQL and Composer respectively.

Some of our favourite talks were:

1. Ben Dechrai, demonstrating how to build PHP trojans.
2. Zach Holman, giving solid advice about how to build great working and teaching environments.
3. Davey Shafik, describing many of the internal aspects of the Zend PHP Interpreter.
4. Steven Cooper, connecting all manner of IoT devices to payment gateways. 

One of our developers, Christopher Pitt, spoke on the topic of Asynchronous PHP:

PHP has emerged from it’s dark past; just in time to learn from the advances in event-based programming languages/platforms. As a result; there is vast, untapped potential in developing event-based, real-time applications. Utilising emerging open-source projects, like ReactPHP and Ratchet, PHP developers can join the party. 

You can check out Chris's presentation feedback and slides here. The talk was fun and informative. Some of the attendees had this to say:

As someone who hasn't worked much in this area, I found it very helpful. It was good that it covered a range of different frameworks and included code demos that actually demonstrated how they behave at runtime.

This was a great talk. Competent, to the point, engaging and packed with useful information. And a great topic with lots of relevance for developers in contemporary PHP projects.

We can't wait for next year!