So, the discussion about djcelery integration into rpgmaker.net never quite came…I’ll get back to that one in the future. In the meantime, lets talk PHP!

Over the weekend of March 2nd – 3rd I attended my first conference as an actual employed developer! Along with a co-worker, I traveled to the University of Minnesota to take part in the first (annual?) MidWest PHP conference. It was definitely an interesting experience. I attended talks on using Backbone.js, Websockets, enterprise PHP architecture, Symfony2, Laravel, Drupal (gross), and building testable PHP applications. My favorite talk was, by far, the opening keynote by Joel Clermont titled, “Learning how to Learn”. It was a bit of a meta talk about how to approach learning as a developer and I hope to apply some of the things Joel went over in my personal and professional life. You can view the slides here: Learning How to Learn on Speaker Deck. After that talk, my next favorite would have had to been the “Building Testable PHP Applications” talk by Chris Hartjes. Chris is a very passionate guy and that really came across in his talk. I’ll definitely be putting some of the best practices and methods he talked about into practice the next time I write pure OOP PHP. You can view the slides for Chris’ talk here: Building Testable PHP Applications on Speaker Deck.

Overall the conference was a great learning experience and I hope to attend again next year if possible.