Speaking (and eating hot chicken) at Southeast PHP

Last summer, Matt Trask took me to get my first taste of Nashville hot chicken at Hattie B’s. I was in Nashville for Music City Code, and Matt wanted to pick my brain about conferences: the good, the bad, and the…not so good. He revealed that he and some of the other members of the Nashville PHP community were in the early stages of planning a new conference: Southeast PHP.

As news started coming out about the conference, I made sure to follow along closely on Twitter. I met up with Matt and some of the other organizers last December while I was in town for WordCamp US, and I even purchased a blind-bird ticket with the express intent of giving it away to a member of an underrepresented group (that ticket is still available as of this writing, by the way):

I just picked up a ticket to @SoutheastPHP that I’m looking to give to a member of an underrepresented group.

If you’re in (or can get yourself to) Nashville this August 16-17, my DMs are open. #phpchttps://t.co/U7IHqQbuXa

— Steve Grunwell (@stevegrunwell) February 13, 2018

Now, almost a year later, I’m proud to announce that I’ll be speaking at the inaugural Southeast PHP this August in Nashville, TN! I’ll be giving an updated version of my Building for the PHP Command Line Interface talk (which seems to be especially popular this year):

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.

For a town with such a rich history, I’m ashamed that it took me until my late twenties to first make it out there. Now, I’ll get to visit for my third time in just over a year, and just days following my 31st birthday! Anyone for belated-birthday cocktails at a certain speakeasy?