Two Talks at php[tek] 2020 in Nashville, TN

Update: Unfortunately, php[tek] 2020 has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

After a break during the first quarter of this year, I’m proud to announce my first talks have been scheduled for 2020. Even better, it’s one of my favorite conferences, in a city I can’t seem to get enough of: I’ll be giving two talks at php[tek] 2020 in Nashville, TN.

Yes, that’s right: php[tek] has moved to Music City itself, Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve been fortunate enough to visit Nashville several times in the past few years, and I’m thrilled to plan my return.

Mr. Grunwell Teaches Typing

I’ve heard from some of the members of the CFP review panel that this was one of their favorite submissions, which is great feedback for a brand new talk:

PHP has traditionally been a loosely-typed language; sometimes that “1” is an integer, but other times it can be a string or even “true”.

This implicitly-typed can be helpful when we’re first getting started, but as our systems grow more complex we often find our code riddled with type-checks and explicit type-casting.

What if we could move this logic into the interpreter? PHP’s (optional) strict typing lets us clearly state, for example, “this method accepts an integer and will return a string”; if the function is given or returns anything else, PHP will let us know. The result? Cleaner, less-ambiguous code, happy IDEs, and clear method signatures.

This session covers the type system in modern PHP, including argument and return type declarations, strict mode, and interfaces. Attendees will learn how to introduce strong typing into existing applications and best practices when developing new codebases.

I feel it’s important to mention that I’ve only included my name in the title because it’s a play on “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing”; I don’t have the legal resources to handle litigation from Big Keyboard.

TIL that Mavis Beacon (most known for teaching typing) is a fictional character: https://t.co/cDATyTMBc0

What else have y'all been keeping from me?! pic.twitter.com/zstWy2ckpu

— Steve Grunwell (@stevegrunwell) January 22, 2020

Code Review: For Me & You

This talk has a fun bit of history with php[tek]. Last year, my friend Tessa got really ill during php[tek], so much that Samantha, another friend, had to step in and give a code review talk.

Samantha didn’t have a code review deck handy, but knew that I a) have a code review talk I had given before and b) freely publish my slides on GitHub; she reached out, and I gave her the URL for my code review talk, which she used as her starting point.

This year, I get to be the one to deliver it 😁

On the surface, the idea of code review is a no-brainer: why *wouldn’t* we want a second set of eyes on our code, especially before deploying to production?

As we peel back the layers, however, we find that the topic of code review is much more nuanced. How detailed should the review be? Who is qualified to perform the review (hint: it’s not just senior developers)? Can we afford to take another developer away from their project to review this one? What steps can we take to ensure reviews are constructive, rather than demoralizing?

Attendees will gain deeper insight into some of the arguments for and against systemic, peer code review, as well as pick up some useful tools to make code review a natural part of their teams’ workflow.

I hope to see y’all in Nashville this May!