ConfPad

Our job might be to build web applications, but we can't build apps that rely on networking if we don't know how these networks and the big network that connects them all (this thing called the Internet) actually work. I'll walk through the basics of networking, then dive a lot deeper (from TCP/UDP to IPv4/6, source/destination ports, sockets, DNS, switching…

"The talk aims to highlight the importance of testing, why developers must spend more of their time testing, how testing generates more robust applications and why testing makes developers' lives easier. The talk is based around a live coding demo. The talk will: - Explain the difference between tests that prove an application works and tests which aim to b…

Over the years, software teams have questioned if PHP is a good choice for building web services. In this talk, I will share how we use PHP on the backend for Glu Mobile’s flagship mobile game Design Home, enabling it to regularly rank amongst the top free mobile games - both in downloads and grossing - since its launch in the Apple App Store and the Google …

Continuous Delivery Pipeline as code is key helping you to ensure long term maintainability. Treating your pipeline as code helps you to version it in your SCM of choice, makes changes easily traceable and lets anyone on your team make required changes. In this session I will show you how we build and maintain our Continuous Delivery pipeline using tools lik…

The blockchain is a hot new topic in the technology due to the rise of various cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin being a most prominent example. How does it work? What advantages does it give? What problems do they solve? What problems can be solved that way? I want you to dive with me into the immutable world of blocks where I will explain everything, from a simple…

As a kid, do you have ambitions for the future? “When I grow up I want to become a …”. Maybe you wanted to become a fireman, an astronaut, a nurse, a teacher, or a police officer? As you grow up, these ideas evolve and get replaced with actual ambitions, actual hopes and dreams. These might be entirely different than your childhood dreams. But how do you rea…

15 years ago, plain text password storing was normal with some using MD5. We look back now and wonder what we were thinking! With GDPR and people thinking more about personal details, its about time we caught up and started storing them securely. There are many uses for personal data and is often sought after by criminals for targeting people. How can you pr…

The Lego Movie came out almost 4 years ago, and it taught children everywhere the importance of teamwork. And what teamwork, and working in harmony, actually is. Let’s just hope that those lessons really stick with these kids. Because let’s be honest, we’re making a mess of it. But it’s not too late for us. We can learn from the Lego Movie as well. I’ll show…

APIs and microservices are how we build modern web applications and serverless technologies make this easy. This session will show you how serverless applications are built and how you can leverage your PHP skills to build APIs of all shapes and sizes. We will cover how to use your current knowledge to build applications in PHP within Apache OpenWhisk, lever…

Have you ever heard yourself or someone else say “Don’t deploy on Friday”? Perhaps it’s your company’s policy?

Since it's founding, Tebex has processed over 18 million payments for games servers around the world. This is a rich data source, and one that we've significantly under-used. We know there should be ways of using this data to improve our product and to make our merchant's lives easier - how and where to start, now that's a totally different question! Join Li…

PHP's flexibility makes it easy for beginners to start programming, but it also allows for projects to easily evolve into a coupled spaghetti architecture that makes them hard to maintain. SOLID design principles can help us write code that's easier to understand, extend and maintain.

Learning more than one programming language is key to becoming a better developer. It is like adding a new tool to your toolbox. The more tools you have, the easier and quicker you’ll be able to tackle whatever job you need to do. You’ll also be able to use the right tool for the job, and who doesn’t like that?! I picked up Go (golang) a few years ago as it …

Learn in this talk the new out of the box features of the most popular database in the world! It will blow your mind what you can do with just plain old SQL. Come on and watch the live demo!

After days, weeks, or months of coding many developers don’t know how to gauge the quality of their code. I’ll introduce tools to grade, benchmark, and analyze PHP code in an automated fashion allowing developers to write better quality software. Then I’ll explain key metrics to help understand what may need to be refactored, and use code smells to point out…

In this presentation we will look at storing complex data in a single field. Many noSQL solutions are created around this (such as Redis’ lists, sets and hashes; MongoDB’s records), and many relational database now also support storing complex data in a single field through specific data types (such as PostGreSQL’s JSONB or hstore). Each of the different dat…

Database joins can be expensive and you can reduce dives into the indexes/data by using JSON columns. By loading data kept in smaller 'stub' tables into main tables it is possible to minimize joins for simple data like address, phone numbers, and the like in schemaless JSON documents. Yes, third normal form or better has advantages at many levels but it is a…

"Alice and Bob have covered the basics of secure communication but cryptography can offer us more than this. After a brief refresher on the basics, we'll take a look at some of these other aspects of cryptography including hash functions, elliptic curves and quantum cryptography. Then we'll take a look at some practical applications answering questions such …

"Microservices are the latest architectural trend to take the PHP community by storm. Is it a good pattern? How can you use it effectively? In this talk, we'll explore real world experience building out a large scale application based around microservices: what worked really well, what didn't work at all, and what we learned along the way. Spoiler alert: we …

Building REST APIs is becoming an ever more common task for PHP developers to do and whilst the task may often sound simple in that it involves reading some input, and getting (or persisting) to a data source and returning some JSON, there are a lot of common pitfalls and complications that you might encounter along the way. In this talk we'll look at how we…