Last week, I went to Berlin to present the Symfony Content Management Framework to the German PHP crowd. I did a presentation almost exclusively based on code. I showed how to develop an application with the Symfony CMF step by step. But rather than trying to live code, I prepared a series of pull requests that I switched through and showed the interesting code changes. This is a rather unusual format and I lost a few people, but I also got enthusiastic feedback from the audience. The tutorial is also online at github for those that want to have a look at it.
Fellow Liiper Lukas Kahwe Smith did two presentations. RESTing with Symfony brings together REST theory and Symfony implementation tricks for REST APIs. There is a Bundle for that explains how to find and evaluate third party bundles for Symfony, and is an appeal to not reinvent the wheel. Rather than spending time to do yet another mediocre bundle for the same purpose, invest that time makeing an existing bundle better ā which is harder but more sustainable in the long term.
I also went to some other talks. One of my highlights was Dennis Benkert with his presentation on Dockerizing Symfony Applications. The talk contains many interesting recepies how to handle a symfony application including console support in docker. It was also clear about the current limits and challenges with docker (persistent filesystem for example). The other highlight was Johann-Peter Hartmann talking about Leadership in der Softwareentwicklung. This talk is about the management perspective of agile companies and held a lot of interesting and sometimes amusing background that developers who care about their work environment should think about.
Sensio Germany did a lot to ensure the conference was a nice experience. There was a social evening with free drinks in (and outside the) rainmaker loft club and colab space. I got to talk with many people about the CMF, explaining ideas and concepts and getting valuable feedback. One important bit is that I should write a blog post about the CMF routing component and how its usable stand alone even outside a full stack Symfony project. At the hackday on Saturday, a couple of people got their hands into the CMF and investigated the frontend editing, looked at the UX of the sonata admin and fixed warnings from Sensiolab insight.
