Speaking at WavePHP 2018

I’ve spent most of my life living in Ohio, and it’s a state I very much consider to be my home. However, after a trip to San Diego a few years ago while I was working at 10up, San Diego certainly entered the running. When I heard that a new PHP conference, WavePHP, was starting up in San Diego — at the same resort we stayed in for our team meetup (so I already know where the best tacos in the area are) — I knew I had to apply. Now, I’m finally able to announce that I’ve been accepted to speak at the first-ever WavePHP!

I’ll be giving two talks at WavePHP: Building for the PHP Command Line Interface and Testing Like You’ve Never Tested Before (Because You Haven’t).

Building for the PHP Command Line Interface

My PHP CLI talk seems to be pretty popular this year, and I’m pleased to see a lot of interested from the community:

Executing PHP from the command line enables us to interact with our applications in new and interesting ways: from performing site maintenance to scaffolding new projects, CLI tools like WP-CLI, Artisan, and Drush make it easy to interface with our code without ever opening a browser.

Attendees will be introduced to popular PHP CLI tools and their default capabilities. We’ll discuss characteristics of good CLI scripts, strong use-cases for writing custom commands, then write several CLI programs across different platforms.

Testing Like You’ve Never Tested Before (Because You Haven’t)

True story: I’ve been pitching this talk for two or three years, but didn’t get to give it until WordCamp Kent 2018. If the idea of automated testing seems foreign and scary, fear not: this talk is designed to be a very beginner-friendly, “this is what the terms mean, what unit and integration tests look like in practice, and ways to demystify PHPUnit” crash-course in automated testing.

Testing software in an automated fashion is one of the best ways to guarantee quality, reduce bugs, and prevent regressions in our code, and is a prerequisite to operating in a Continuous Integration environment. Unfortunately, the most difficult parts of testing come right at the beginning: scaffolding a test suite and writing our very first tests. For those who are new to automated testing, these hurdles can prove overwhelming.

This talk covers the fundamentals of testing, in a beginner-friendly way. We’ll discuss how testing makes software better, the various levels of the Automation Pyramid, how to scaffold some basic unit and integration tests, and discuss the characteristics of great tests.

If you’re able to make it out to the coast, please let me know and I’ll direct you to some awesome tacos not far from the resort. Also, you know, you’ll be in San Diego, which is always a plus!