I’m back from this year’s PHP North West Conference, and finally have a few moments to talk about what was (yet again!) another excellent year.

I was there to present two talks – Introducing a Quality Model For MVC Applications, and Ways To Measure Your ORM’s Cost. It’s the first time since the php|cruise back in 2004 that I’ve presented twice at the same conference, and brings me up to something like 15 unique talks and workshops presented over the last 11 years.

I want to highlight one talk in particular from this year’s conference – Matt Cockayne talking about being a good code scout. This talk got promoted from the Unconference track to a spare slot on the Sunday morning. I’ve been thinking about pitching a keynote about how we all need to be great ambassadors for PHP, and I think Matt’s message would make a great keynote for our community.

Whether I’m speaking or just attending, I always enjoy the PHP North West Conference. Their conference team always do everything that they can to make each conference the best that it can be. In my opinion, the explosion of quality, community-based PHP conferences in Europe owes much to the example set particularly by PHP North West. We’ve come a long way from when I started speaking back in 2004

I’m really grateful that conference committees here in the UK – both PHP North West and PHP UK – continue to give me opportunities to come and talk at their conferences. Whether it’s about the problems of framework lock-in, component-based architectures, Git workflows, or indeed about driving quality, I’m often talking about things years before the PHP community moves that way. My work is often about solving problems most people don’t yet realise that they have, and that can’t be an easy sell, both within the committees that select talks for conferences nor to attendees when they’re buying their tickets.

This year’s conference may be over, but there’s no rest to be had.

• I’m already preparing another talk to deliver to the PHP Oxford user group later this month, called “Why Do We Test?” – expect plenty of ethical dilemmas in this one
• November sees me once again volunteering at Aberystwyth University, coaching 2nd year Comp Sci (and related) students on job hunting
• I’ll be speaking at PHP Surrey at the start of January 2016, possibly on writing a test suite for PHPFastCGI – you should come just to watch Andrew give his PHPFastCGI talk, it’s cry-out-loud funny

… and I’ve promised both Glasgow PHP and The Edinburgh PHP User Group that I’ll come up and present to them before the end of 2016.

Source: Stuart Herbert