Southeast PHP Conference: Hot Chickens and More

The 2018 Southeast PHP conference just wrapped up, and we were excited to contribute. This two-day conference in Nashville brings 150 PHP developers from around the world together to exchange ideas, listen to speakers and make new connections.

This year, we get to boast that one of our very own developers, Kenneth White from Nashville, was one of the lead organizers for this event, while another Pyxlite, Jim McCaslin, was also able to attend.

We found the PHP conference to be an experience we wouldn’t have wanted to miss. If you weren’t able to attend, we’ve broken down the who, what and where of the Southeast PHP Conference below.

P.S. We loved this conference so much, we’re already planning for Southeast PHP 2019!

The Who: Speakers

The conference involved two tracks of speakers who covered topics like modern PHP development concepts, career development and mental health.

Keynote Speakers included industry experts:

• Ijeoma Ezeonyebuchi
• Cal Evans
• Josh Holmes
• Graham Hoefer
• Samantha Quiñones
• Jenna Quindica
• Adrienne Lowe

These outstanding speakers covered topics including engineering with empathy, building diverse teams and a strong culture, great working habits, mental health and career development. Although all topics were extremely informative, a few discussions in particular stood out as particularly valuable.

The What: Our Favorite Talks

Assemble Your Code in Stages: Leveling Up With Pipelines

Steven Wade Jr. shared his thoughts on managing code changes more easily with Pipelines. His insight included how to break code into smaller chunks for easier isolated testing as well as the benefits of this method.  Wade also covered when and when not to use pipelines and situations in which this method can best benefit your application.

Big Iron: PHP Lessons from Cold War Supercomputing

Big Iron: PHP Lessons From Cold War Supercomputing by Edward Barnard showed us great examples of how seemingly archaic hardware–namely the Cray-1 Supercomputer–and programming processes from the 80’s not only influence the here and now, but can actually be used. From speeding up computations to securing data across the ’Net, lessons learned by the pioneers of supercomputing are directly applied to modern PHP programming.

New frontiers in voyage of APIs from REST to Reactive using MicroServices + GraphQL

A current challenge for developers is the ability to design flexible and device-independent optimized APIs. This talk by Amrita Jain spoke to this challenge, while providing best practices and core principles for serverless microservice architecture.

Peeling Back the Magic: Modern PHP Without a Framework

Every developer has a favorite (or most comfortable) framework. Veering away from this can be frustrating, confusing or daunting. During this presentation, Kevin Smith provided knowledge and tools to help developers prepare for future PHP projects, regardless of the framework its written in.

The Why:

That’s a wrap! We left this conference with a new level of excitement about the work that we do and the new group of friends we made within this extremely important community. You can bet we will be one of the first on the list for next year’s Southeast PHP conference…we’d love to see you there!

Updated: Apr 13, 2022