Having arrived on wednesday, I went to see the you have ruined javascript rant by Rob Ashton. It was definitely an entertaining and passionate talk. I feel not qualified to decide how much Rob is exaggerating, but he definitely brought forth valid critics and reminded the general rule of not always using a large framework even for small tasks. In the evening I had dinner in downtown Verona.
Thursday started of with an introduction to AngularJS in combination with Symfony2. I liked the examples how even when doing a frontend application, Antonio still manages to use the power of Symfony Forms and other components without doing everything twice. When using Symfony2 and AngularJS you definitely want to look at these slides. In the afternoon I did my Symfony CMF tutorial. I walked the audience through building an application with the CMF. I showed a lot of code and explained both the “how?” and the “why?”. I had decided not to do hands on, as two hours is too short for that. I did hands-on CMF at a workshop at PHP Benelux earlier this year, and the 3 hour slot was just enough. The walkthrough was well received and i had interesting discussions with some participants after the workshop.
The day was wrapped up by an unconference talk about the joys and frustrations of working on composer by Composer himself (yeah Jordi loves it when you call him that :-P ). Jordi showed some really funny and some sad examples of reactions he got. After that, it was off to the speakers dinner, which was awesome italien cuisine (as in, not Pizza but delicious food with good wine).
Saturday started with meeting Simone Fumagalli who is contributing Nginx support to the FOSHttpCache library. We met for the first time in real live, and wrapped up his pull request. Meeting people is just as important to me about conferences as the actual talks. I made it in time to see a mind-blowing presentation on Docker by Alexander Mols. I definitely need to look into this tool. On a modern Linux (which is of course what I work on), its just so insanely faster and easier than running Vagrant to normalize the development setup. And even with other operating systems, it will work at least as good as vagrant. Thanks to dokku it is even possible to use Docker in a Heroku-style deployment process by simply pushing to a git remote. Alexander cautions that both projects do not yet claim to be production ready, however. In the afternoon, I ended up sitting in the sun and talking to a bunch of interesting people most of the afternoon. Discussions ranged from PHPBridge, a project meant to introduce total non-programmers to PHP with a strong social twist, over community building to more personal discussions with people from all over Europa.
It was my second time in Verona and this edition of PHPDay was just as great as I remembered the first time. I saw good presentations and got new inputs, and had many interesting discussions with interesting people. It was great to meet friends from the PHP community and make new friends. I am thankful that Liip supported me going to the conference, and also sponsored the conference.