We had the pleasure to take part in one of the largest industry conferences for developers – PHPCon Poland 2019 – as its Platinum Sponsor. With 543 participants, we can say that the conference was pretty popular, and once again, the event has made a very good impression on us.
Workshops and presentations
Due to a large number of lectures. the programme was divided into two main streams – Green and Blue. Since it was physically impossible to participate in all of the events, the participants had to choose what they considered to be more interesting. The majority of presentations was characterised by high quality, and the most notable of them were:
- DDD, CQRS, ES, Hexagonal... and Symfony – if you've read our previous article, you already know that it was one of our favourites. How can an application use the Symfony framework without being completely dependent on it? How to take advantage of best practices and methodologies in such a system and still be able to find your way around the code? How to use Event Sourcing only where it actually makes sense and leave other models in different hands? Such dilemmas can be easily solved with good architecture, which was showcased by Tomasz Kowalczyk, who demonstrated the necessary balance between the main assumptions of the lecture and specific examples.
- Event Storming as an introduction to the struggle with Legacy Code – A way of working that simply works for both technical people, who can use it to model the system, as well as for business partners, who can get a real map showing them how the application actually works. Paweł showed that event storming enables people to learn how the system works, which parts of it are responsible for what and whether there are any parts of the system, which are no longer needed because their role was taken over by other modules.
- Serverless PHP – a very good presentation by Sebastian Grodzicki, which we loved mainly because of the fact that it presented a new approach in the PHP world – PHP in a serverless environment. Such novelties make any time spent at the conference a time well-spent!
- Your team vs kebab place vs F1 pitstop. Theory of constraints - primary DevOps element - explained! – is there anything in common between DevOps, kebabs and Formula 1? Turns out that the answer is – yes! Konrad Otrębski showed us how to improve workflow in an IT company, presented in an interesting way, using a surprising, yet accurate comparison.
You can go to Joind.In event page to rate the presentations. We encourage everyone to go there, check it out and rate the speakers. Your ratings will definitely help the organisers of industry events with selecting interesting topics for you in the future, and the speakers will definitely appreciate some honest feedback from the audience.
On the website, you can also find presentation decks for some of the lectures, which gives you the opportunity to catch up if you missed something due to overlap.
Unconference
Unconference is a new and very interesting way of organising industry meetings aimed at exchanging knowledge. Grzegorz Bartman, CEO of our Drupal agency, coordinated the PHPCon Unconference. The agenda included 8 slots, which were booked in just one hour! The Unconference and the first slot belonged to Daniel Kossakowski, member of team Droptica. Although it was the first time the Unconference was featured during PHPCon, it enjoyed great popularity.
Sponsor Zone
Sponsors of the event organised various attractions for the participants, including some treats and cool gadgets – everyone presented their stand in a unique way. There were also contests with attractive prizes. Our stand gave the visitors an opportunity to try and prove themselves in a game, and the three lucky winners got to bring their brand-new drones home.
Afterparty
Free beer, good food and a relaxed atmosphere marked the end of Saturday's attractions. The organisers made sure that the participants could get to know each other better and exchange their opinions about the lectures and presentations. Another of their interesting ideas for integrating PHP developers was a logic game with a prize – a fourth drone brought for the participants of the event by Droptica.
Conclusions
We are glad that the Conference was very interesting, thanks to the professional knowledge of the invited speakers, support from sponsors and good organisation of the whole team, and we will certainly consider coming back to this event next year – both as sponsors, but also as ordinary participants. A small suggestion for the organisers – maybe the next edition could be held in a bigger city? Szczyrk is not very well connected with other cities – but it’s just a minor suggestion :)
See you next year!
