Join us at the DigitalOcean office, we kick things off at 6:30pm with food and beverages. Followed by some great talks by Erika Heidi and Phil Sturgeon. Erika Heidi, DigitalOcean Developer Advocate
Bio:
Erika Heidi is a web developer / devOp working with PHP and Linux for over a decade. Author of the Vagrant Cookbook and open source projects like phansible.com and dev-human.org, she worked many years as an independent developer, experimenting with a large diversity of projects and tools. Erika is an active open source contributor, speaker and writer, working as developer advocate for DigitalOcean.

Getting ready for PHP 7

2015 came as an important year for PHP - eleven years after its 5.0 release, a new major version is finally coming our way. PHP 7 is scheduled for release before the end of the year, bringing many new language features and an impressive performance boost.

But how this will impact in your current PHP codebase? What really changed? How safe it is to update? This talk will give you a taste of whats to come with PHP 7 and why you should care.
Twitter:@erikaheidi

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Phil Sturgeon, Software Engineer at Ride
Bio:
I used to contribute to the PHP-FIG, The League of Extraordinary Packages, PHP The Right Way, CodeIgniter, FuelPHP, PyroCMS and a bunch of other stuff, but I gave it all up to join the circus. That didn't work out, so I wrote a book about APIs and got a job at Ride, who are saving the world #onelesscar at a time.

Title: Building Extraordinary Packages

Abstract: Back in the day, we had PEAR packages. These were often very well written, but due to PEARs lack of popularity we ended up just using mega-frameworks and writing bundles, modules, cells and sparks for that framework. Since then Composer has been a bit of a savior, but the way in which we make these packages is still new and scary.

There are a lot of talks about building good code, and writing OOP well, but how do you make a Composer package that is as high in quality as you can? Things like SemVer, avoiding NIH syndrome verses knowing WHEN to fork or make a new package, responsible deprecation and loads more.

The League of Extraordinary Packages is a group of developers who have banded together to build solid, well tested PHP packages using modern coding standards. The name might be a little silly, but the group dedicates itself to active maintenance, handing over projects when a lead has to step aside, working together and an absolute dedication to following and supporting standards.

twitter.com/philsturgeon