This last weekend I had the opportunity to attend a conference in the cold and snowy state of Minnesota called Midwest PHP. It was an exciting 12 hour drive up there, and an even more exciting 12 back. Like most conferences there was a hard time deciding what sessions to attend since you must consider the teacher, the subject, and the level it’s targeting.
Beyond PHP : it’s not (just) about the code !
By Wim Godden
This was a great session that gave you a big handful of tips. It covered a lot of little things you can use to optimize your site such as database indexing, transactions, querying in loops, and more.
Enterprise PHP Architecture through Design Patterns and Modularization
By Aaron Saray
Covering lots of various patterns that were close to the model classes themselves. Making the distinction between domain models and data models was an eye opener and spawned a very creative discussion at work on when and where you would need to separate the two. Two other patterns including services and data mappers were also covered.
Scaling PHP with HipHop
By Sara Golemon
Like most, I’ve heard of HipHop being used by Facebook to increase performance, but most sites aren’t big enough to need it, right? What I realized from going is that HipHop and PHP have drastically diverged and have various syntax. They gave use cases for which jobs could utilize HipHop and when you should use PHP.
Caching and Tuning fun for high scalability
By Wim Godden
While listening I felt a curtain opening and revealing a bright ray of light. I realized I was approaching a caching problem the completely wrong way. Caching is often necessary for websites, but not just for high load websites. Often you want to cache HTTP requests, heavy sections of a website, or even scaled images. He provided lots of useful techniques and tools and when used with the correct job can majorly speed up the requests.
Lightning Talk
By Jeremy Mikola
This was a hilarious lightning talk about none other than Lightning! View the lightning talk.
Conclusion
In all, I was very happy with the outcome of the conference and would love to go again, but this time I might consider a flight up there.
