We had a cohort of Earthlings attending the most recent
Madison PHP conference earlier this month. After we returned to the office, got back to work on some amazing sites and projects, we asked folks to reflect on what we heard and learned at this regional hotbed for PHP learning. Special thanks to the organizers of the conference for the great lineup.
Eric Landmann
Matthew Beane’s tutorial on Magento 2 was another reminder that
Magento 2 is becoming mature enough to be used in production, all the major vendors and some smaller players in the ecosystem have converted their extensions, and the codebase and tools available for the developer are far superior than the 1.x series. It runs on PHP 5.6 or 5.7 and has been refactored for speed and adding much-needed features (such as native full page caching).
Eric Anderson
The talk on web components by Pearl Latteier and Abraham Williams (custom HTML elements) was quite fascinating. It’s great to hear about how web technology is evolving. I am often hesitant to get excited about bleeding-edge tech because I know it will be a while before we can fully adopt and take advantage of new features. However,
web components are really exciting could revolutionize front-end development.
Daniel Greig
Gitting More out of Git by
Jordan Kasper really solidified all of the things I had been doing into a more concrete foundation. I am much more confident in what my commands now. (Ask us about how Earthlings are using Git for version control and repos)
Amanda Starich
Application Security Nuts to Bolts tutorial talk by Ilia Alshanetsky was incredibly insightful to what security measures could be taken to prevent attacks on websites and applications. To those not as familiar with application security it was very good at clearly explaining the topic and opening it up for discussion and questions. To those more familiar it was thorough enough that everyone could take something new away from the talk that they never knew before.
The talk “Oh Crap, My Code is Slow” was a pleasant reminder to everyone just how going through the logic in code can assure it runs smoothly, especially when small projects become big projects. The steep but real-life example also gave some insight into how many factors can be looked at if your code is not running as fast as it could be. The presenter, Chris Tankersley, also discussed the importance of when one should feel pressed to optimize code so time is not spent micromanaging something not purposed for a large scale project.
Tom Kuplic
What is your Skateboard? the talk on story mapping by
Emily Stamey as an exercise for application building in PHP was a great reminder of how to do solid discovery with clients to get to the bottom of user needs. It’s something a website project team should not ignore, especially as a team focuses on goals for website actions and business objectives for clients. Really getting to the core of what needs to be built and how users will interact with it through story mapping is something we are interested in using more in our process.
