PHP UK Conference 2018
2018-02-14..2018-02-16
London, United Kingdom
[PHP UK Conference 2013, PHP UK Conference 2014, PHP UK Conference 2015, PHP UK Conference 2016, PHP UK Conference 2017, PHP UK Conference 2018, PHP UK Conference 2019, PHP UK Conference 2020, PHP UK Conference 2022, PHP UK Conference 2023, PHP UK Conference 2024, PHP UK Conference 2025, PHP UK Conference 2026]
who it's for
PHP developers, backend engineers, platform engineers, devops engineers, technical leads, site reliability engineers, open-source maintainers
topics
PHP 7 compatibility checking; AST and php-ast tooling; Xdebug profiling and xhprof; Laravel dashboards with Vue and Pusher; Composer-based Drupal builds; Packer, Ansible and Terraform provisioning; Getting started with Kubernetes; Jenkins continuous integration and deploys; Zero-downtime database migrations; Service Workers for PWAs; Introduction to GraphQL; Developing PHP extensions
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic PHP 7 Compatibility Checking Using php7cc | Mark Niebergall | 51m |
Two static checkers run and disagree: php7cc and PHPCompatibility (PHP_CodeSniffer) run via composer against real repos, show different unique errors and… | ||
| Performance optimisation: how do I go about it? | Kat Zień | 52m |
A simple PHP app called cigar gets profiled with xdebug, xhprof and benchmarking (ApacheBench / wrk) to find the real bottlenecks, not micro‑tips. Profiling… | ||
| Working with Webhooks | Lorna Jane Mitchell | 55m |
A retro guestbook is built that emits real webhooks, with publishing via a queued pipeline using RabbitMQ queue per endpoint to avoid thundering‑herd spikes… | ||
| Theming WordPress | Beth Tucker Long | 44m |
Creates a child theme from a clean parent, adds a stylesheet and functions.php, and enqueues parent then child styles (no @import) so styles load faster and… | ||
| Goodbye Drush Make. Hello Composer! | Oliver Davies | 40m |
Claim: Drush Make is deprecated and Composer is the actual dependency manager used to build Drupal sites; the demo shows a Composer create-project that… | ||
| Climbing the Abstract Syntax Tree | James Titcumb | 54m |
AST introduced in PHP 7 becomes an explicit intermediate data structure that decouples parser and compiler, yielding about 10–15% faster compilation at the… | ||
| Creating a dashboard with Laravel, Vue and Pusher | Freek Van der Herton | 44m |
A realtime dashboard built with Laravel 5.5, Vue components per tile and Pusher broadcasts via a private channel that is open‑sourced and actually deployed. It… | ||
| Build, provision & deploy in the Cloud with Packer, Ansible & Terraform | Thijs Feryn | 49m |
Bakes a Debian Stretch VM image with nginx and PHP via Packer builds AMIs (JSON config, snapshots registered like ef90ad1), provisions the image with Ansible… | ||
| Building Websites with Zend Expressive 2 | Rob Allen | 41m |
Shows how to build a real Expressive app that scales by demonstrating a working Bitcoin demo, wiring dependencies with factories and a config provider, and… | ||
| Urban Legends: What You Code Makes You Who You Are | PJ Hagerty | 36m |
Argues that language choice rarely limits outcomes and gives concrete counterexamples: 68% of web apps use PHP, Facebook and Twitter run PHP at scale, a legacy… | ||
| What You'll Miss on AWS & How To Find It | Mike Lehan | 46m |
Nine concrete gaps are named and fixed: 99.95% SLA (~four hours downtime/year) and multi‑AZ RDS failover 1–2 seconds, auto scaling + ELB session and deployment… | ||
| Database Schema Migrations with Zero Downtime | Michiel Rook | 37m |
Claims practical, repeatable ways to migrate schemas without downtime: use expand-contract pattern and feature toggles to read/write both columns while rolling… | ||
| Zero to Jenkins: Automatic builds + deploys | Michael Heap | 42m |
Shows a full, live build pipeline from an empty VM to an auto-deploy: Jenkins 2 setup (requires Java 8), GitHub org auto-scan of repos/branches/PRs… | ||
| Building Cloud-Native Applications | Michael Hausenblas | 01h 00m |
Claims that cloud-native equals faster shipping and reproducible deployments get concrete here: a PHP app builds into a container image, the CI pipeline pushes… | ||
| Introduction to GraphQL | Michael Cullum | 46m |
States that GraphQL can replace or complement REST, demos against GitHub production data and a small PHP app, and shows concrete features: queries that query… | ||
| Behaviour Driven Development and Behat: Telling Stories Through Code | Matt Brunt | 45m |
Argues that BDD complements TDD by driving design with concrete examples and shows a working Behat workflow: write Gherkin features (PlayStation 4 basket… | ||
| Debugging PHP with Xdebug | Mark Niebergall | 49m |
Live demo shows Xdebug + PhpStorm actually stepping into code, inspecting types, setting conditional breakpoints, using watches and the console, and extending… | ||
| From zero to multi-platform Chatbot with BotMan | Marcel Pociot | 47m |
Shows a working PHP chatbot stack: BotMan framework that abstracts Facebook, Slack, Telegram, Alexa and more via drivers; middleware that injects Dialogflow or… | ||
| Service Workers and their role in PWAs | Ipsha Bhidonia | 36m |
Service workers are shown as a real client-side proxy that registers, installs (cache.addAll) and activates to serve cache-first fetch strategies, offline… | ||
| London Calling: Creating a customisable, multi-tenanted i18n solution | Liam Wiltshire | 46m |
Buycraft serves ~500,000 Minecraft webstores and has handled 16 million payments across 255 countries so a bespoke i18n layer is built: JSON locale files per… | ||
| How Doctrine Caching Can Skyrocket Your Application | Jachim Coudenys | 53m |
Explains concrete wins and limits: Doctrine 2.5 Second Level Cache stores identifiers and raw values (not hydrated objects) and cuts database round-trips… | ||
| Inversion of Control Containers Beyond Constructor Injection | Hannes Van De Vreken | 45m |
Claim: IoC containers do far more than constructor injection and can compose decorators, aliases and contextual bindings so small single‑responsibility classes… | ||
| Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Playing 'Developer' | Gary Hockin | 31m |
Career shortcuts backed by actual choices: use version control as a quick save and commit frequently; add automated tests (start with browser acceptance tests… | ||
| Content Security Policy to the Rescue | Dheeraj Joshi | 40m |
Shows a live demo of an intentionally vulnerable app including a crypto‑jacking example that claims ~4,000 sites were hit recently and demonstrates CSP… | ||
| Introduction to PHP Extensions | Derick Rethans | 48m |
Converts a PHP function into a loadable C extension, showing the actual build steps (phpize, configure, make), the API calls used (zend_parse_parameters, PHP… | ||
| MySQL 8 -- A New Beginning | Dave Stokes | 34m |
MySQL 8 is a major redesign of the most popular database on the web. it will have a true data dictionary (no more .frm, MYI, or other little files) which means… | ||
| The secrets of Cryptography | Chris Riley | 55m |
Historic ciphers (Caesar, substitution, Vigenère, Enigma) motivate modern choices and attacks: demonstration that substitution falls to frequency analysis… | ||
| Get Rolling Fast with Symfony Flex | Beau Simensen | 35m |
Claim: Symfony Flex is a Composer plugin that automates installing and removing bundles by applying recipes and packs, generating config, env vars and… | ||
| Getting Started with Kubernetes | Bastian Hofmann | 57m |
Shows a live demo that builds a container image and deploys a PHP web app to a cluster using kubectl and a registry push, wires configmaps and secrets, mounts… | ||
| Command and (e)mission Control | Barney Hanlon | 41m |
Uses tactician command buses and the Symfony EventDispatcher (with Broadway for event sourcing experiments) so controllers and CLI become thin adapters that… | ||
| Zero to API with Lumen | Amanda Folson | 33m |
Builds a working REST API using PHP and Lumen, showing routes, Eloquent models, migrations and tests, and notes which Artisan commands are missing. Implements… | ||
| The why and the how of moving to 7.x | Wim Godden | 49m |
Argument: upgrade because PHP 7 delivers dramatic wins — 200–300% speed and up to 50% memory reduction — while adoption sits low (only 12% on PHP 7 vs 87%… | ||
| Going Backstage on Community Trends: Bug or Feature? | Jenny Wong | 27m |
Timeline and hard numbers drive this: 26 UK user groups, first in 2004 and 23 by 2015, plus a survey finding ~37% of groups go on a break. Practical costs and… | ||
| nothing matches | ||