What the Tech in Asia engineers learned at the PHP conference

In September, NUS held the first PHPConf in Asia. It is an exciting time for PHP devs in Asia as they finally had an official conference to get together and meet other PHP devs. The event spanned the course of two days, which all of the web developers at TIA attended.

Here are our thoughts of the event.

Melvin

This was my first major event that I attended in person since I’ve picked up PHP, and programming in general in 12 years. It was a real eye opener for me, having to meet with fellow web developers and network with them.

The keynotes that I had the most take aways are the ones that cover software engineering techniques in general as you can use them across programming languages and technologies. I believe that grasping key concepts of programming is extremely important because it reduces the initial learning curve when adapting a new technology and/or a programming language.

Only two of the lightning talks stood out to me: the first keynote talks about using React, a popular front-end framework by Facebook, with PHP. I wished that the keynote speaker had more time to speak about it. The second was by an NUS student on reinventing the wheel; I could relate to most of the experiences he had shared during the keynote, being a recent NUS Computer Science graduate myself.

All in all, it was great exposure, and a great way to take some time off from work to listen to like-minded developers on what they had been working on.

Josh (DevOps)

This was the first language specific conference I had attended. It was more refreshing than a lot of conventions which aim to just shovel commercial products down your throat. This is probably in part due to PHP’s open source mentality. Even when there was a product based talks they were about open source software, so you didn’t feel like it was just an advert.

That being said, there was only two real interesting talks. The keynote by the language’s creator, in which he discussed the future of PHP and PHP7, and another talk regarding advanced optimizations. The rest of the talks felt very amateur in both presentation and content. With most of the speakers not having very strong public speaking skills, or talking about topics which was junior at best, it was hard really feel involved or stay captivated by the events.

I was pretty happy that all of the talks focused on developers and the language rather than their managers.

There was an artist on stand by, which drew a caricature of each presenter, which added a nice comic undertone to the entire event.

Would I go again? Probably not.