“Technical Debt” at PHPDX

As you may be aware, I’ll be heading out to Portland this week to speak at the inaugural Cascadia PHP, but Cascadia PHP President Alena Holligan reached out last week to see if I’d be willing to extend my stay and speak at the local Portland PHP user-group, PHPDX, the Monday following the conference. Always willing to speak somewhere offering pizza and geekiness, I quickly re-arranged a flight and am proud to be attending (and speaking at) my first PHPDX meetup!

I’ll be giving my Up to my Eyeballs in Technical Debt talk, which hasn’t been presented since php[world] 2016. Readers of php[architect] Magazine may recognize the subject matter however, as it was featured in the May 2018 issue of the magazine:

Every decision we make in our projects has the potential to increase or reduce technical debt. While the only way to completely eliminate the debt is to never write any code, there are steps that we as engineers, project managers, and project stakeholders can take to mitigate our risk.

This talk covers the concept of technical debt, its potential to devastate projects, and red flags that project teams can look for to reduce its impact before it spirals out of control.

If you’re in Portland next week — attending Cascadia PHP or not (though I hope you are), please join us at Graybox at 6:30pm!