Two Talks at Midwest PHP 2019

I’ve been fortunate enough to speak at most of the community PHP conferences across the continental United States (that can pay for travel, anyway), with one notable exception: Midwest PHP. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that list will be one shorter this March, as I’ll be giving two talks at Midwest PHP 2019!

Building for the PHP Command Line Interface

This talk got a lot of attention in 2018 (and even name-checked in my friend Ian’s process control talk), and I’m thrilled to bring it to Midwest PHP!

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)

This seems like it’s already my most popular talk of 2019: this talk will be given at both CodeMash and Nomad PHP in January, so the topic will be very top-of-mind:

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.

I hope to see you at Midwest PHP 2019 this March!