Longhorn PHP is a long running community driven PHP conference taking place in Austin, Texas next week. I will be presenting and would love to see you there.
Why I am attending
I was selected to give two different sessions, one on JWTs and a workshop on protecting your APIs. I’m especially excited about the hands-on workshop, where users will, using a web based training platform, explore various options of protecting an API written in PHP.
For this workshop, we’ll start with an unprotected Chuck Norris joke API. (A sample joke: “Chuck Norris makes onions cry.”). Participants will then protect the API with a variety of methods, ending up with an API protected with an OAuth2 access token issued by an authorization server.
I also look forward to connecting with the PHP community. I’ve worked in PHP off and on for decades. I wrote a raw PHP app in the early 2000s for a book club. I supported a local food directory in CakePHP for over a decade. And I’ve worked professionally with PHP solutions like Wordpress and Drupal.
But I’m less familiar with more modern PHP frameworks and solutions like Laravel. When I’ve glanced at them, I’ve thought “that looks a lot like Rails” and my heart warms. So this is a great chance for me to learn more about what PHP folks are working on nowadays
In particular, I’m looking forward to Serializing Modern PHP and Minimal vs. functional: “Clean” code as a practical – rather than aesthetic – virtue, but there are of course a number of great sessions.
Community conferences
It’s great to be able to give talks about topics I’m interested in, but I’m also attending because community driven conferences are fantastic. We need more of them.
- They’re entry points for attendees into the wider developer community, especially newer developers
- There are fewer developers than at bigger conferences, but the attendees are more engaged
- You can interact with developers and users in a far more personal and high-bandwidth fashion
- They’re an important step on the ladder for newer speakers; more professional than a meetup, less intimidating than a large conference like Re:Invent or KubeCon
We lost a lot of these events during the last few years. Community conferences are difficult to run, and require buckets of volunteer time and money. In my experience, no one does a community conference for the money.
I’m glad I can attend Longhorn PHP and hope you can too. There are still tickets available, including a virtual only option.
Meet up
If you want to meet up with me at Longhorn PHP, I’ll be around! Ping me on LinkedIn or Twitter/X, or fill out our contact form and I’ll see it.
