I recently attended the PHP World Conference, which was held near Washington DC. Artemis Consulting presented on the subject of ‘Building an Accessible WordPress Federal Website.’
The spirit of community and sharing of knowledge, skills and experiences was key to the event’s success and evident across the workshops and presentations. If you were looking to expand your skill set with like-minded individuals, then this was certainly an event for you.
It was refreshing to be reminded that developers really do share very similar challenges in their everyday roles. From debugging production issues, to forgetting to save files and wondering why you were not seeing your edits in a browser, these very common daily experiences bring us together.
Speakers were candid about their experiences, which also helps others identify with them. Veteran developers spoke of challenges with browsers, hardware, keeping up-to-date with technology, and a myriad of other issues that they and novices face every day. No developer is perfect and we face common obstacles and successes when we work hard and push through technical issues we may encounter.
There were many great presentations, delivered with energy and enthusiasm. These provided technical knowledge and useful real-world coding examples. The subjects covered a wide range within the development life cycle, and were aimed at all skill levels. In addition to presentations, there were workshops that were available too, covering more in-depth areas, such as ‘Domain Driven Designs in PHP’ and ‘Creating A PHP Library.’
I enjoyed a crash course or refresher on Regular Expressions, which suddenly do not seem as terrifying as perhaps they once did. Another notable presentation I attended was on ‘Web Application Security: Browsers Fight Back,’ which among other things, gave a great overview of using security directives in browsers to tackle cross site scripting.
The engaging presentations and depth of knowledge of those sharing their skills was excellent. Hopefully, I have given you a glimpse of what information was shared to convince you to put attendance next year on your schedule.