This week I attended the international PHP conference 2013 in Berlin. I always enjoy the four days full of workshops and sessions to keep me up to date with the latest technologies in web technology and PHP in particular. Most of the speakers are well known experts from around the world who love to share their knowledge and expertise with the large number of eager to learn visitors.
On sunday I joined the workshop “Test Automation Code Retreat”. This was about creating acceptence tests for an example web application. In five sessions a 45 minutes and changing pairs (Pair Programming) we developed several scenarios and tried to find the best code for the task. We used PHPUnit in combination with Selenium to run frontend tests. With Behat we learned about the concepts of Behaviour Driven Developement. It was very interestant to learn about how others build their application tests to assure the best code quality.
The session starting on Monday give a good insight in many different topics. I always like the sessions of Sebastian Bergmann to get first hand information about PHPUnit best practices. Another hot topic was the use of Nginx as an alternative to Apache and the common LAMP stack.
Other topics on my timetable were “Git Crash Course”, “Automated Deployment: From Jenkins to Production”, “Best Practices in Symfony 2”, “Appointing a Proxy”, “Scaling PHP in the real World!”.
Berlin is always worth a visit, especially during PHP conference 😉
