Last week I attended the PHP Conference Brasil for the first time. It was awesome and I’m going to try to cover some of the best parts of it (IMHO) here.

Before we start, it’s worth saying that they named the conference rooms after well known community members in Brazil and there were some ElePHPant footprints guiding the way to each room. Really cool.

Tutorials

First day of the conference, there were some tutorials available. I can only talk about the ones I attended, so I’m sorry that I won’t cover the others.

Intelligent Bots

On the first day I chose to attend the one about “IntelligentBots“. It was awesome. It covered building a chatbot for FB Messenger and Telegram using custom PHP code and then we used api.ai to build a chatbot without any code. Kudos to @jacksonfdam for this awesome tutorial and he also gave a talk on the topic, which I attended, so I’m not going to cover his talk below – but it was awesome as well.

Middlewares & PSR-7

Presented by Elton Minetto, a mini-tutorial convering building middlewares with Zend Expressive and all the concepts behind micro-frameworks, middlewares and PSR-7.

Talks

All the talks I attended were awesome in certain ways. I’m going to cover here the ones that I found most interesting and, again, I can only talk about the ones I attended. That being sad, I’m sorry for not covering all the talks, I’m sure they were all interesting. Also, I’m going to translate the talk names to English here, but you can check the original names (in Portuguese) and schedule on in the conference website.

“How to manage quality in a project without losing your sanity” by Elton Minetto

A facinating topic IMHO and he shared some knowledge from the experience he has in his own company, which made it even better.

“From 1 to 1.000.000 users” by Felipe Signorini

One of the best talks about performance and scalability I’ve seen. He gives a really honest and sincere overview on what it takes to be able to support lots of reqs/sec. I really liked the way he presented. One of the best parts was that he said scaling is not only a matter of tools, but it also requires some level of maturity of the company/team involved in the application. Another good point is that the talk was structured in such a nice way that at each stage he showed what changes need to be in place to support that amount of req/sec from infrastructure to team processes (by “stages” I mean “1k req/sec”, “100k req/sec”, …).

“Artificial Intelligence & PHP: pattern recognition and neural network” by Wellton Costa

Awesome talk on such an interesting topic. I’m personally facinated by this topic and I’m going to try to learn a lot more about it. He presented some examples using C++, OpenCV and neural networks, which was awesome, and then he showed what it needs to use that in PHP, compiling an extension and writing the same code in PHP. That was awesome so see in action.

Modern PHP by Ari Stopassola Junior

He presented tools, processes and some insights on building a modern PHP application. Showed what is available for CI/CD, QA, changes in the language, optimizations, etc. Really nice, well presented talk.

API Tales of Woe and Woah! by Phil Sturgeon

Phil talked about building APIs, handling errors and shared with us his experience on building APIs, versioning and the importance of documentation. Really nice talk.

Phalcon 3.0 & Zephir by Andrés Gutiérrez

Remote talk where he presented the state of Phalcon right now (v3), how to use it as a full-stack or micro-framework and then dig in on how they built it using Zephir, a language that basically allows you to write C-extensions in code that looks a lot like PHP. Really cool stuff, I’ve played with Phalcon a while ago, it’s looking really good these days. Zephir looks really interesting as well.

“Full-stack: developing in the agile World” by Rodrigo Ibraim

He covered the changes in building web applications from the Waterfall era and now. He pointed that the term “full-stack” can be applied in any area and showed a couple of things you should know to be able to ship features and fail fast. Really nice topic.

“Real-time applications with RatchetPHP” by Aryel Tupinambá

The speaker told us about the concepts behind Real-time technologies, such as WebSockets, and how you can build a Real-time app in PHP using RatchetPHP. I’ve played with it before, made me want to update my own demo and maybe write a bit on it later.

“Daemons, workers and bots with ReactPHP” by Aryel Tupinambá

He explained the concepts behind ReactPHP and shared things from his experience on using it in production for worker daemons.

“Real-time communication with WebRTC and PHP” by Michael Douglas Barbosa Araujo

He presented the concepts behind WebRTC and how to use it now in PHP, shared his experience with using it in production, some gotchas with firewalls. Really cool stuff, I hope I can use this stuff soon.

Closing notes

This was a really nice experience and made me want to come back next year. Really nice. Kudos to Galvão and his crew for organizing such a nice event and thanks to madewithlove for all the support. Keep on rocking.

Oh, btw, I got a new sticker:

See you all soon.