PHP UK Conference 2011

I recently attended PHP UK 2011, this was the second PHP UK conference I’ve attended.

Key point from last year: this year was much better organised! Everything ran on time, last year we started late and talks over ran. Congrats to the PHP UK team for much improved organisation.

Several talks have been posted on vimeo.

The talks I attended this year:

• Zero MQ is the answer – Ian Barber
• Agility & Quality – Sebastian Bergmann
• Continuous Improvement in PHP Projects – Thorsten Rinne
• Beyond Frameworks – Stuart Herbert
• 99 problems, but the search ain’t one – Andrei Zmievski

The best talks of the day for me were Andrei’s talk on Elastic Search and Ian’s talk on Zero MQ. Sebastian’s Agility and Quality talk had some useful information in the second half but the first half made analogies with World of Warcraft, which didn’t really do much for me (I don’t play it).

Thanks to all the speakers who took time to put their talks together. I’ve installed Elastic Search on this server and will wire up the search to it.

You should be running a CI server, even if you don’t have unit tests

I took time out to set up Jenkins CI at work this week as a result of this conference, the underlying message I got from several talks was: you should be running a CI server even if you don’t have unit tests. “What use is that?” you might ask. Well as I found out at jenkins-php.org there’s a whole suite of tools you can run on your codebase, providing metrics to show what shape it is in, and enables you to see if you’re making improvements.

For me this was another worthwhile year at PHP UK and look forward to next year’s schedule!

(I took my DSLR with me, you can view my album of images on imgur)