Romania PHP — first edition
Between the 5th and 6th of October 2017, some of our colleagues participated at the first edition of Romania PHP — a national conference dedicated to PHP Developers. The conference took place in Cluj-Napoca and the attendees had the opportunity to meet big names from the PHP world-wide community.Just to mention a few: Sebastian Bergmann — PHPUnit creator; Marco “Ocramius” Pivetta — who is part of Zend Framework CR and Doctrine Core teams; or Lorna Jane Mitchell — the author of “PHP Web Services” and “PHP Master”.
The two days of the conference were split between a full day of workshops and one day of classical conference presentations. During the first day, the attendees participated at one of the two hands-on workshops held by leading international trainers.
The first workshop called “Building testable applications”
- was held by the three main consultants of thePHP.cc: Sebastian Bergmann, Stefan Priebsc and Arne Blankerts;
- its aim was to help the developers have a better understanding about the problems they are solving each day. They were introduced to the steps that are necessary to follow in order to write clean and testable code, using Event Storming, Test Driven Development and respecting SOLID principles.
The second workshop called “Doctrine ORM and DDD from the ground up”
- was held by Marco Pivetta;
- the goal was to teach the developers how an ORM improves the quality and efficiency of their daily work. During the workshop, Marco covered a lot of topics related to: how to model logic business into aggregates, how to properly use Doctrine ORM, and how to use Domain Driven Design with a deep looking into CQRS.
The Conference
During the second day of the conference, all of us participated at the presentations held by famous international speakers.
- The series of presentations started with Marco Pivetta, who introduced us to the Event Storming concept plus CQRS in the context of DDD
- The series was continued with a presentation given by a local speaker, Dorin Avasiloaiei, who amazed us with his technique of doing functional testing and his benchmarks
- The last presentation before lunch was given by Gary Hockin, a Developer Advocate from Jetbrains. He shared us 43 PhpStorm tips and tricks. He showed us there is a shortcut for everything and we don’t even have to remember them, there is even a shortcut for this too
- After lunch, Sebastian Bergmann introduced us into the PHPUnit world, presenting us some of its history, and continuing with some of its best practices and he showed us how to test our code with as little effort as possible.
- And last, but not least, the conference day ended with Lorna Jane Mittchel, Developer Advocate for IBM Cloud Data Services, who spoke about how to build offline-tolerant apps using CouchDB and PouchDB. Even if Lorna’s presentation was the last from the series, her native english humor and dedication for the subject refreshed us more than the break we had before the presentation.
At the end of the presentations, the conference continued with: Panel Discussion, Prize Raffle and After Party. We learned a lot at the conference and we cannot wait to use that knowledge in our upcoming projects.
Stay tuned, we’ll be back with some key learnings from the first edition of the PHP Conference in Romania.
