Speaking at php[world] 2018

php[world], held annually in the greater D.C. metro area, has long been one of my favorite conferences. It was my first non-WordCamp conference speaking engagement, and I’ve been lucky enough to speak at or attend all but one php[world] since it started in 2014.

This year, I’m fortunate to count myself among the speakers, giving two talks this November at php[world] 2018!

Code Review: For Me & You

This is one of my new talks for 2018, which premiered at WordCamp Dayton:

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.

A Crash-Course in PHP Namespaces

This is a brand-new talk, based on my popular A Crash-Course in PHP Namespaces for WordPress Developers article:

Way back in 2009, PHP 5.3 was released to the world and with it brought support for PHP namespaces — a way of easily separating your code from other developers’ code, which has since become the de facto way of encapsulating functionality across the PHP ecosystem.

With namespaces, multiple packages could use the same class and function names without conflict, because each one would operate in their own PHP namespaces. Unfortunately, many PHP developers who focus on development in frameworks that de-emphasis these features such as WordPress may be in the dark on this extremely useful language feature.

This talk aims to shed light on PHP namespaces, especially targeted developers who haven’t yet encountered them. Attendees will leave the talk with a firm grasp on PHP namespaces, how they work, and how they can be implemented in plugins and themes.