Tek Roundup

I’ve had a chance to reflect on last week’s PHP Tek and JS Tek conferences, where two of the Roave team, Charles and I, attended. This isn’t our first time at Tek – in fact Roave sponsored PHP Tek conference last year. It is laudable that conferences, especially those like PHP Tek, have kept going, despite the devastation that Covid has wrought on the community meetup scene. Looking across the calendar since Covid, several conferences are notably missing, which is a real shame, but I’m glad to see Tek going from strength to strength.

Drama kicked off this year’s edition, with the ballroom having been closed off entirely thanks to a medical incident. The whole first day no-one, including the organisers, were allowed access to the ballroom, including much of their equipment! Kudos to Eric, John and the team for overcoming this, and managing the situation admirably. Despite this setback, the conference talks were spot on; a great selection to pick from over four busy tracks. A few of my highlights were Andy Snell‘s code reviews talk, Guman Chauhan‘s talk about zero-trust architecture, and Mark Niebergall‘s developing using AI talk. However, my favourite talk of the conference was Mike Page‘s unconference talk on highlighting positivity about the PHP language and its community, and encouraging the growth mindset.

Naturally, in the current state of the ecosystem, AI was a hot topic – both on the schedule and the hallway track. There was a wide range of opinions, from AI skeptics up to full on advocacy. Wherever you land on the spectrum, it definitely struck up some interesting conversations. Speaking of the hallway track, it is always excellent catching up with people, and meeting new folks too. I managed to spend some time chatting with Elizabeth Barron, the new executive director at the PHP Foundation. Another highlight of the conference was new to me – a job fair, where several companies wanting to hire people were given the floor to advertise their available roles. This worked really well, and gave everyone in the room – including us at Roave – an opportunity to make new connections. Finally, a tradition at many PHP conferences, WurstCon, took place after the conference closed; a group of us headed to a hot dog restaurant to continue the WurstCon tradition.

Overall, PHP Tek is well worth attending. The talks range from introductory to technical, there are four tracks to pick from, and – of course – a most excellent community. It was enjoyable to catch up with the community in Chicago, and hope to be back again. We were lucky enough to connect with the PHP community in such a meaningful way, and a great platform to highlight that Roave currently have some availability to take on new and exciting projects!