PHP South Africa

The world we live in is one where data is one of the most valuable assets. There are many different pieces of data we can analyse on all kind of data from analytics of user behaviour of your platform, user generated content, monitoring of exception rates, or when your core business model is to provide some kind of analytics platform. In this talk we’ll dive into how you can, in your PHP applications, perform some simple trend analysis techniques to build models, analyse data to get useful information and spot anomalies using machine learning techniques; and how those machine learning techniques can be applied to other day-to-day scenarios too.

A lot of developers are developing applications without using tests and this is a problem that many software companies face. Tests can improve the reliability of your codebase and also safeguard it against bugs before your code reaches production. We will introduce TDD and how to implement TDD into your project workflow using Travis CI. We will look at a sample Laravel application and how to implement TDD. The topics that will be covered on the TDD front are feature tests vs unit tests, testing events, working with testing databases, implementing PHPUnit and Mockery and using Laravel Dusk to implement browser testing. The Travis CI portion of the talk will focus on how to specifically implement it into your project workflow, we will cover what is CI and what is Travis CI, benefits of using Travis CI, how the build system works, setting up Travis and running builds, announcing build status via notifications and an overview of the Travis CLI. By the end, you will be ready to leverage TDD and Travis CI in your own applications!

How is our beloved language doing? Analyzing all of GitHub, StackOverflow and Hacker News via the publicly available Google BigQuery datasets (some 40TB+ of data) this presentation aims to give humorous and ingenious insights into our TIOBE Index Top 10 language. If you’ve ever wondered which PHP versions are still in use, which packages are most widely used or if you’re the only ‘Full StackOverflow Developer’ this is the presentation for you. Similarly we’ll look into things like PSR adoption (who’s still using tabs), framework popularity and community participation with a view to how we are doing and where we should be going. Trolls are welcome – I have the data…

Hadoop is a big data technology suite from the Apache Foundation that provides a range of tools for storing, interacting with and manipulating large data sets, or to help solve big data problems which might relate to the structure of the data just as much as the size of it. With many companies approaching points where they need to be able to handle large amounts of data, either right now or looking forward in order to scale, Hadoop is one of the core technologies that can help aid you there. In this talk I’ll provide an outline of HDFS, Hive and Spark, three of the core Hadoop tools, and how you can use them; the differences between Hadoop and other technologies such as Elasticsearch; about Presto, a distributed SQL query engine that will allow you to query your big data clusters (HDFS, MySQL, PostgreSQL or Cassandra alike) with simple SQL queries. And finally, I’ll talk about how you can utilise these resources from within your PHP application, allowing your platform to interact with your huge volumes of data without having to copy your business logic into another language.

We have all seen some pretty interesting things happen when using floats. You might even know how to get around most of these problems. But why do these problems occur? Why do floats become so inaccurate when working with really small, or really large numbers? In this talk, we will take a look at fractions through the eyes of a computer to get a better understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes. We will also take a look at some best practices that will help in your career forward.

As an API with a lot of complex data, our bottleneck is and always has been serializing. It has been a long journey for us to get the most performance out of this. We are proud of what we’ve accomplished. Let me share our journey trying a lot of alternatives in PHP; Including JMS Serializer, pure json decode, better serializer, Symfony serializer. And in the end: A colleague wrote php-to-go so that we could GO beyond PHP, using PHP and GoLang together, for an amazing performance boost.

All the speakers of the day up in front and ready for questions.

In year 2000 when PHP 4 just came out, we had functions.php and when it started being big we made functions2.php. When object orientation came out we renamed our databasefunctions.php and put a class around it and called it OOP. PHP by then, was not very mature. I by then, was not very mature. The community by then, was not very mature.

We have come a long way since then! We now believe 12 year old girls on the internet are not FBI agents. We now have type hints, and namespaces, and composer! We have all matured.

Let me share my story of amazing technology that changed my life. I’d also like to share some horrible community experiences, and the awesome ones that kept me going.

Let’s keep growing, because we never really stop.

A mature DevOps process is essential to the successful delivery and continued operation of a software project. However quite often development consulting houses like my own, Tangent Solutions, are running many projects concurrently, all in different stages of delivery or maturity. This creates a challenge in terms of providing visibility on project metrics and progress which are necessary for operational oversight. This results in the need for activities such as weekly project meetings, manCos, steerCos and all sorts of other ‘Cos’. Another spinoff of this need for visibility is to have monitors with dashboards displayed throughout the office, but with infrastructure/cloud monitoring also jostling for space, one quickly begins to run out of walls.

This approach to surfacing visibility isn’t acknowledging the massive gains technology has made over the last years, specifically technological advancements that allow us to Augment our Reality. Presented with these problems we questioned ourselves and looked for innovative solutions to an incredibly important problem. Our first step to augment our reality was to implement a Natural Language Processing Bot using LUIS and the Azure Bot Framework connected to MS Teams allowing us to interrogate DevOps tooling (VSTS, GitHub, Jira) and provide easy access to high level project and sprint status and projectreporting. The next step was to implement Cortana, allowing many of the same bot interactions to be performed via voice. The coup de gras in our AR revolution was to build a mobile App using AR that allows a user to be shown project metrics when identifying a team marker through a live camera view.

While this functionality is undeniably cool, it provides a fantastic window into the modern workplace of tomorrow. This presentation will provide a demo of our AR DevOps solution as well as dive into the implications of these technologies and how we can leverage different aspects of AR to enhance our productivity in our everyday lives.

You’ve built an API, launched it, and people aren’t excited about it. Why might that be? Many people release APIs for public consumption without any regard for developer experience. This creates a developer ecosystem that invites failure or worse — it can encourage people to seek alternatives. This talk will cover common API pitfalls (spoiler, not all of them are code-related!) and how to create an environment around your API that will make developers happy.

We are delving into scaling Laravel – preparing for live television events with the folks at Swipe. Achieving 10,000 API requests a second on your PHP web application. A practical guide to building scalable, high concurrent & fault tolerant PHP web applications.

Scaling is hard but can be done if you follow certain processes, implement the necessary developer operations and architectural design. In this talk we’ll cover our development methodology, AWS infrastructure, system visibility and monitoring, load & stress testing, deployment processes and setting up a war room.

You’ve heard of Zend’s new framework, Expressive, and you’ve heard it’s the new hotness. In this talk, I will introduce the concepts of Expressive, how to bootstrap a simple application with the framework using best practices, and finally how to integrate a third party tool like Doctrine ORM.

Microservices are a thing, and with them come some interesting new ways of building distributed applications. While CQS (and its successor CQRS) and Event Sourcing are not brand new concepts, they have found a new home as relevant design patterns in the world of Microservices.

Gareth will aim to provide a primer for all to understand what exactly these two patterns are, how they work well together and the benefits (and down sides) of adapting your development to make use of them.

All the speakers of the conference up in front and ready for questions.