PHP Barcelona Conference 2015

I had the pleasure to attend the 2015 PHP Barcelona Conference this weekend and I decided to blog about the experience. The lineup was amazing and included Zeev Suraski, one of the founders of Zend and writer of PHP3, which gave the closing presentation. It was an awesome experience and I can’t wait for next year’s edition. All presentations were good, some even better than expected. Some touched “exotic” areas for regular PHP development, such as performance and the SPL (remember the big-O notation :P) or asynchronicity, while others tackled solutions to day-to-day problems, such as architecture, design patterns and best practices.

I too had a talk, about my team’s migration from a couple of legacy platforms, one running a desktop site and the other a mobile / tablet one, to a state of art code base running a responsive website under ESI. All my developer colleagues came to support me – thanks guys! – and I can say that I’ve learned a lot from the experience on the stage.

Lessons learned

1. just do it – it’s actually easier than it looks. Nervousness is always a problem in these cases. I remember my first presentation on stage, at Oxygen Accelerator few years ago, and although the audience was just around 100 people I was far more nervous. I fixed it then with a small bottle of scotch before going on stage Now the audience was 5 times larger but I didn’t experience the same emotions. This time, a sip of Baileys’ did the trick! However the worst part remains getting miked-up backstage…I just wanted to run away.
2. rehearse multiple times – there’s no way you’ll get it even close to right the first time
3. bring a clicker & laser pointer, especially if you’re using your own laptop – I could see that some of the other speakers had more experience in this area
4. take a bottle of water on stage – speaking for one hour with powerful spotlights blasting light and heat at you can make you really thirsty and a dry mouth will make your presentation unintelligible for the audience
5. there will always be negative feedback – just can’t please everyone. I was lucky, most feedback was positive and the negative one was constructive, so I have a good idea on how to improve for the future. Trying to pack 6+ months of work in 40 minutes of presentation is difficult and there will always be something left out.

Long story short, here are my slides: