Two Talks at the Inaugural PHPDetroit

I’m extremely excited to announce that I’ll be giving two talks this summer at the first-ever PHPDetroit conference in the Greater Detroit, MI area!

I usually keep it on the down-low (as a resident of Buckeye Country), but I was born in mid-Michigan before moving to Columbus, Ohio when I was three. Still, I spent lots of time visiting my Michigan family during summers and holidays growing up, so it’s pretty amazing to now a) be working for a Michigan-based company and b) get to visit Michigan semi-regularly for conferences like WordCamp Ann Arbor, Beer City Code, WordCamp Grand Rapids, and now PHPDetroit.

Greener Pastures: Infrastructure from the Ground Up

This will only be the second conference appearance for this talk, coming off the heels of php[tek] 2018:

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.

Building for the PHP Command Line Interface

One of my favorite talks to give, updated to reflect some of the newer, cooler things I’ve learned since I first gave it in 2016:

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.

If you can’t tell, I’m really looking forward to this conference, especially with the speaker lineup and proximity to home!