I’ll be Speaking at php[tek] 2018!

I’m not shy about telling people that php[tek] and php[world] are two of my absolute favorite conferences. Both are organized as collaborations between php[architect] and One For All Events, and play host to some of the biggest names in the PHP ecosystem. That’s why I’m ecstatic to announce that I’ll be giving two talks at php[tek] 2018!

Building for the PHP Command Line Interface

The first talk is a favorite of mine, mostly because I love blowing peoples’ minds with “wait, I can write those scripts in 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.

I’ve given this talk a few times before (including php[tek] 2016), but I have some new tricks to share.

Greener Pastures: Infrastructure from the Ground Up

This is a brand new talk, focused on some of the decisions I made when I left 10up to join Growella as the Director of Technology in late 2016.

In late 2016, I left my comfortable agency position as a Lead Web Engineer to join a small media startup as its first Director of Technology.

One of the major draws to the startup was its complete lack of technical debt: I’d be in charge of deciding everything we used, from hosting platforms, platforms, and office tools. The opportunity was perhaps the greenest of fields I had ever laid eyes upon.

While the company ended up not being the right fit for me, the lessons learned from researching, evaluating, and deploying the solutions have informed recommendations and decisions in my career post-startup.

Attendees will gain insight into the technology needs and available solutions for a small, web-based publisher, and the criteria that led to each decision.