Value Objects and Documentation @ Cascadia PHP 2024

In the wake of a global pandemic that left a lot of great conferences as relics of the 2010s, it’s always a great feeling to see some old favorites rise from the ashes. When Laracon announced its 2024 conference would be held in Dallas (and thus eat up a lot of Texans’ conference budgets), the organizers of Longhorn PHP decided instead to focus their efforts on helping another great community conference, Cascadia PHP, get back on its feet. Cascadia PHP will be holding its first event since 2019, and I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve been accepted to give two talks at Cascadia PHP 2024!

The Beauty of PHP Value Objects

A few months ago, I published an article about value objects in PHP, and received quite a few appreciative “thank you for helping make sense of this!”-type comments from folks online and at work.

Now I’m (literally) taking the show on the road and giving a brand new talk based on the article.

Imagine, if you will, a world where you’re able to define a tailor-made type for domain objects that is always valid, type-safe, immutable, and easy to test. No more email addresses passed around as plain strings, nor associative arrays being passed around with potentially-undefined keys and unpredictable types.

In this session, we’ll dive deep into PHP Value Objects: where are they useful, how do we write (and test!) them, and how do we ensure that the data they encapsulate is valid? Attendees will leave with a better understanding of domain modeling, Value Objects, and immutability.

Warning: once you start using proper value objects, you may never be able to go back to using anything else!

I’d Like to Write the World Some Docs

I was able to completely refresh this talk last year for Longhorn PHP 2023, and I’m really pleased with how it’s ended up.

It takes a special kind of person to enjoy writing documentation; not only do I have to write [ideally] working code, but now I have to write words that a human being can understand? What is this madness?!

Luckily, good documentation lives on outside your codebase. By following common documentation standards, we can generate comprehensive manuals that instruct others how to integrate with our software. After all, to code is human, but to document is divine.