Today in the DPC Speakers Interview:
- Thijs Feryn
- Marcello Duarte
- Matthew Weier O'Phinney

Thijs Feryn:

1.     Tell us about yourself, who are you, and what do you do in daily life?

My name is Thijs and I'm an evangelist at Combell. We are a the #1 web hosting company in Belgium and my job is to listen and talk to people about technology. I try to bridge the gap between code and infrastructure by understanding what developers do. In the process I use this knowledge to optimize internal flows or influence strategic decisions. In my spare time I'm also involved with PHPBenelux, the PHP community for Belgium, The Netherlands & Luxembourg. We even organize our own PHP conference in January

2.     What’s your favorite underappreciated piece of software?

A lot of people don't appreciate vim as much as they should. I'm not a vim expert, but I love using it and learn something new about it every time I use it.

3.     If you could make one change (big or small) to every PHP project out there, what would it be?

I would love to have PHP projects compiled into binary and make it go super fast. HipHop currently does that. But it would be great if that would flow back into the main PHP project in an easy to use way.

4.     What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen lately, programming or otherwise?

I love the new wave of infrastructure tools out there. The DevOps community is plugging things like Puppet, Chef, Logstash, CollectD, Graphite, StatsD. I hope PHP developers learn more about it, because it will make their job much easier.

5.     How did you become passionate in the subject of your talk?

I'm not an average developer and don't write that much code myself. I have to worry about other people's code and make sure it runs fast. This involves caching and other performance tricks. I've been dealing with application performance for the last 8 years and noticed that a lot of developers don't follow the (unwritten) rules. It feels good when you can make a slow application run fast and teach a developer some tricks. It gives great satisfaction.

6.     What was your first speaking experience like?

My very first (international) speaking gig was actually DPC 2010. I was quite nervous but happy to get the opportunity after years of submitting. After that things went very fast and I could speak everywhere. Up to this point I have almost done 85 talks and I believe I'll hit the 100 limit next year. I've listed them all on http://talks.feryn.eu.

So a BIG thank you to the DPC organization for helping me out and launching my speaker career. 

7.     Where do you see yourself in the future?

I'm an ambitious guy and I want to become smarter and more influential. That means attending even more conferences, speaking to more people and using all that feedback internally. I'm positive that our company will focus even more on developers and that the products and services we offer will be even more suited for devs. I also hope that PHPBenelux grows even more, not in terms of quantity, but quality. We're doing really good so far, but we can do an even better job.

Marcello Duarte

1.     Tell us about yourself, who are you, and what do you do in daily life?

I am a developer with coaching and managerial skills. I enjoy when I can present ideas to teams that turns out to make them feel more productive and happy. I have coached many teams, from my organisation and customers, into various processes, practices and attitudes based on collaborative software development – my nickname for agile. My background is very mixed, even though I have spend the last 13 years playing around with PHP, I have had time to work with Python, C++, Cobol and BASIC (I must confess!). My first computing course certificate is from the 80s. I have worked for a Bank for 6 years, baked bread on a bakery, general labourer at a construction site, lived as a monk for another 6 years, started and ran a design studio for 4 years, used Photoshop 2.5 (in black and white), studied Sociology, Graphic Design and Computing for Management. I am a Scrum Certified and Professional, but also worked as a project manager and got the PMI certification.

On my spare time I enjoy spending time with my 2 sons, with whom I play football, minecraft, or just hang out and chat about various subjects like Physics, the mind or who is stronger Hulk or the Fantastic Four's Thing? I contribute to PhpSpec. I like to go to the movies, dine out and feel the warm of the rare London sunny days.

2.     What’s your favorite underappreciated piece of software?

Mink. An abstraction layer for drivers that simulate the interaction with the browsers. Very useful for acceptance or even functional tests.

3.     If you could make one change (big or small) to every PHP project out there, what would it be?

I would try and influence the mainstream full stack/MVC frameworks to direct themselves to serve more as an implementation detail and be less like a bunch of base classes people have to inherit from and whose constrains they have to work under. Frameworks should be a plugin to my application, allowing me to drive my development with clear, descriptive tests – decoupled from the framework. Much in the way of Alistair Cockburn's "hexagonal architecture". I reckon that's how MVC frameworks would be if they were developed by testers.

4.     What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen lately, programming or otherwise?

That would have to be docker (http://www.docker.io), a Linux container engine. Just discovered it yesterday, actually. I was gobsmacked by the functionality it offers.

5.     How did you become passionate in the subject of your talk?

By giving training on the subject. The more you repeat a training section, the more insights you get. 99% perspiration 1% inspiration. I really believe that a good understanding of the role of design in agile projects is scarce, but very much needed.

6.     What was your first speaking experience like?

Revealing. I did not know why I identified so much with it. I realise now that it's because I value learning and sharing that I enjoy so much training and speaking at events.

7.     Where do you see yourself in the future?

I want to contribute more. I want to see my contribution adding value to what people do. I hope that I can continue on some capacity helping facilitate software development to be more collaborative and more focused on real goals. I like being a part of that revelation. Helping people realise that they can produce useful stuff in an effective and efficient way. It's all about people. It's all about keeping myself on the learning and sharing loop.

Matthew Weier O’Phinney

1.     Tell us about yourself, who are you, and what do you do in daily life?

I'm a husband and father, and spend each morning shepherding everyone through the door - getting them up, making breakfast and coffee, you know the drill. Once they have, I head downstairs to my office, fire up my IRC client, update my git repos, and get down to the work of maintaining open source projects, and, more specifically, Zend Framework.

2.     What’s your favorite underappreciated piece of software?

The "tee" command in unix. I love being able to follow along as a process executes, while still knowing I can at any point go and view the logfile later to see if I missed something scroll by.

3.     If you could make one change (big or small) to every PHP project out there, what would it be?

I can't think of one thing all, or even most, PHP projects do, making the idea of making one change to every PHP project that would actually affect them unlikely. Frankly, this is one thing I like about PHP -- so many ways to do things. :)

4.     What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen lately, programming or otherwise?

Commander Hadfield covering Bowie's "Space Oddity" from the ISS. It's a major conjunction of two of my favorite things in life.

5.     How did you become passionate in the subject of your talk?

I've been interested in RESTful APIs for some years, but not terribly thrilled with using XML for them due to the challenges of serializing objects to XML (and deserializing as well). JSON is simply tons easier -- but introduces a new challenge with regards to creating hypermedia links. When I discovered Hypermedia Application Language, I was immediately intrigued by the possibilities it presents as well as how consistent it is. I started writing a library to make HAL-style RESTful JSON APIs in ZF2 to experiment, and was hooked.

APIs are such a huge part of web development today that we cannot afford for them to be difficult to write; we need tools to make them quick and painless.

6.     What was your first speaking experience like?

Horrendous. Awful. Humiliating. I was drafted for a tutorial on "configuring PHP" for the very first ZendCon, along with Mike Naberezny, as David Sklar, who'd proposed the topic, ended up having to cancel. We ended up speaking to an audience of 3, and our content and delivery was such that if I myself had been in the audience, I'd likely have slept or walked out.

Surprisingly, I didn't let that stop me, and neither did Mike; we did a tutorial the next year on PHP best practices, filled a room, and had a blast.

7.     Where do you see yourself in the future?

All over the internets.

We are happy to announce that we will have a tutorial and a talk on the new mobile operating system that will make every web developer’s heart beat faster; Firefox OS! In these sessions you will learn, or even get some hands-on experience (if you join the tutorial). If you want to know how you can get your apps ready and try to take your share of this new emerging market, be sure to get your tickets before they run out!

Firefox OS is generating a lot of buzz lately, especially now that the first developer preview devices are available. Web developers around the world are gathering to test, create applications and discover what the amazing new web APIs have to offer.

At the conference Sergi Mansilla and Jan Jongboom will show you everything there is to learn. If you want to get serious with developing for this platform you can join the tutorial; if you’re just curious you can visit the talk to see what this new platform is all about.

If you’ve already booked a tutorial and want to change it to the Firefox OS tutorial just fill out the contact form indicating your order number, name and previous selected tutorial and we’ll do the rest!

It's time to share more about this year's new Hackathon. First off, Zend has been kind enough to sponsor the room, food and drinks for the event. In their honor, the event is called “The Zend PHP Hero Hackathon”. We’ll also have members of the local AmsterdamPHP group helping out throughout the evening.

Below you’ll find the rules for the Hackathon but there’s one important thing to do first. We have a limited amount of food and drink, so if you plan to participate then please register here first! This helps us plan ahead and ensures you don’t go hungry.

So, how does this work? Well, it's pretty simple:

1. There are no restrictions on what tools, libraries or frameworks you can use.

2. We'll kickoff the Hackathon at 5:30 PM on Thursday after the tutorials end. If you're attending the Symfony2 exam at the same time, don't worry: we'll save your food and help you get back into the action when you finish the exam.

3. We'll start with Matthew Weier O'Phinney presenting an example project and giving an overview of the evening. Zend is also offering free hosting on DevCloud for any projects that need it and Boaz Ziniman will give a demonstration of how it works.

4. After that, the attendees will take the stage! If you've got an idea that you'd like to assemble a team for, we'll give you a timeboxed slot on stage to pitch the audience. Try to convince other developers to code with you. Once all the pitches are complete, you can sign up for a team and start coding!

5. We'll hack away Thursday night until 10:00 PM (or until the venue kicks us out) but you can keep coding through the conference. Zend will have a support table open throughout the conference where they can help you with tough issues or integrating DevCloud with your project.

6. Your project must be online no later than 1:00 PM Saturday. Please mail the final submission to dpc-hackathon@ibuildings.nl, including the project’s URL and the Github/BitBuckt/etc repo.

7. Our judges will award prizes to different categories and all winners will be announced on stage at the closing ceremony. Teams are awarded extra points for following along with this year’s theme of REST APIs and Mobile applications. You can see the full scoring sheet for more details.

If you’re interested in the latest hackathon news, you can follow the new @dpc_hackathon Twitter account for all the latest. We’d love to hear about what you’d like to pitch or build at the hackathon, so tweet your ideas to us and we’ll share them upfront.

Of course, the most important rule: have fun! This is our first hackathon at DPC and we’re excited to see people already signing up. If you’ve got an idea or want to spend an evening coding with friends or just want to get into the conference spirit, then go ahead and register while spots are remaining.

Until June,

Above all else, one thing is at the heart of every conference out there: beer! DPC is no different and we're happy to have this year's conference social sponsored by Engine Yard. These guys have been involved in the community left and right lately so their generosity shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

The social will be hosted in downtown Amsterdam at the Escape, one of Amsterdam's best known cafes and night clubs. After the first conference day closes on June 7th, we'll break for a couple hours so everyone can have dinner downtown (i.e. devour as many fries and stroopwafels as they possibly can). Once that's done, we'll gather outside Escape at 20:30 and the party – er, networking can begin! Attendees, speakers and drink tokens a-plenty will all be there in full force.

There's only one catch: Make sure you remember to bring your badge. This is also your ticket into the social so you must have it with you. Badges for the conference days, tutorial days, or both are all valid. Until then, if you have any questions about finding the venue or the social in general, we have a Social page with all the details on it.

We look forward to seeing all of you in June!

We’re pleased to announce that we’ll be adding a Hackathon to this year’s DPC, sponsored by Zend. After the close of our Tutorial Day on June 6th, attendees can meet up for an evening kick-off event, assemble teams, outline their project and start coding! The Zend team will be on hand to help out attendees both at the Hackathon event and throughout the conference. Teams have until Saturday afternoon to finish their project and deliver it to the judges. The winners will be announced on stage at the closing ceremony and will receive some great prizes from Zend.

Don’t have an idea? Come anyways and join forces with another team! Not a Zend Framework expert? No problem, you can use any PHP toolset you like. The only thing you need to do is bring your A game.

More details will be coming soon. In the meantime, you can sign up in one of two ways:

·       If you haven’t purchased your tickets yet, select the Hackathon box during checkout.

·       If you’ve already purchased your tickets, pat yourself on the back! Then sign up for the Hackathon using this form.

In the meantime, don’t forget that Early Bird ends April 28th. That’s this Sunday! If you don’t purchase your tickets by then, you’ll be missing out on a 15% discount. It looks like it’s going to a great DPC this year, so don’t wait any longer.

Until June,

- The DPC Team

Conference checklist:

- Ticket
- Laptop
- Tablet
- Mobile phone
- ... all charged
- Crate to stand on

A crate? Yes, a crate! Got it? Yes indeed, the Dutch PHP Conference and Dutch Mobile Conference will have an Uncon for the 4th year in succession!
Of course you won't have to bring your own crate because DPC13/DMC13 will have a prepared Speakers' Corner.

At the Speakers' Corner every attendee is able to share his/her knowledge, enthusiasm, critisism about any "Mobile" or "PHP" related subject. Even if your subject is not related, but you think every attendee should hear your story grab your chance.

This editions' Uncon will be run by Jeroen van Dijk (@neorey), who you might already know from the PHPBenelux user group. On site he will be managing your 'submissions' using a whiteboard at the Speakers' Corner. Based on the input Jeroen will create the best schedule possible.

If you didn't make the cut on the Call for Papers, here's a second chance to prove the committee wrong! You can apply now for the Friday morning uncon sessions via the @dpc_uncon Twitter account. Send in your talk title and get your name on the schedule!

We are looking forward to another great (un)conference!

We're pleased to announce that Symfony2 certification will be available at DPC this year! We've partnered with SensioLabs to provide the exam on site at the conference. This is the first time certification has been available within the Netherlands and we're very excited to offer it to the local community.

The exam will be offered on our Tutorial Day (June 6th) at the Amsterdam RAI. If you're attending our Tutorial Day (and you should!), we've scheduled it directly afterwards so you won't miss any content. You'll need a valid ID, a DPC ticket and an exam voucher from Sensio to enter. You can use any DPC ticket, tutorial or main day. The cost of the exam is not included in your conference ticket though, so you need to register on the Sensio site as well   ( http://trainings.sensiolabs.com/en/training/symfony-certification ).

If you're interested in taking the exam but still a little uncertain, Hugo Hamon is offering a workshop on our Tutorial Day which is specifically aimed at introducing you to Symfony2 and helping you pass the exam.

For more information, you can select the Symfony2 option when purchasing your tickets and we'll get in touch. If you've already purchased your tickets, feel free to mail us via our Contact page.

We'll be making some other great announcements soon, so don't delay booking your tickets. The Early Bird discount ends April 28th. Until then, we look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam!

Registration is now open. Quickly, go and check out all the great content we have to offer this year! Once you’ve decided that you want to join us, you can go to the registration page to order your tickets. Please note that you receive a 15% early bird discount if you order your tickets before April 29th.

We are happy to announce the schedule. Quickly, go and check out all the great content we have to offer this year! Once you’ve decided that you want to join us, you can buy your tickets starting tomorrow. Please note that you receive a 15% early bird discount if you order your tickets before April 29th.

On our tutorial day we offer 14 amazing tutorials, these consist of full day and half day sessions to get you up to speed on the latest in tools and best practices! The tutorials are a great way to dive into a subject and get your questions answered by an expert.

For tutorial day (Thursday 6th June) you will have to specify which tutorial(s) you want to attend beforehand, during the registration process. If you choose a half day tutorial, you can select 2 tutorials to make it a full day program. We have dedicated rooms for the tutorials with enough space for everyone to sit at a table and do some actual hands-on work.

For the main conference days (Friday 7th and Saturday June 8th) you’re free to decide which sessions you’d like to attend on the day itself.

We hope that you’re just as excited about the schedule as we are. See you in Amsterdam!

Speakers-To-Be thanks for submitting your talks to DPC13; the response has been overwhelming. We’ve already begun the speaker selection process and hope to finish soon. We expect to notify all speakers in approximately two weeks.

When we’ve finished the selection we will start to announce the speakers and conference schedule on this site. Begin of march we will start the early bird tickets sale, so keep your attention to this site.

We look forward to seeing you all at the conference in June,

- The DPC 2013 Team

We're back! And we are glad to announce that we’ll be organising another edition of the Dutch PHP Conference, which will be held in Amsterdam from 6th to 8th June 2013. Thursday 6th will be the tutorial day and June 7th and 8th will be the main conference days. Ticket sales will start early March.

Dutch Mobile Conference
Just like last year, DPC has a sibling! Because web development is moving to mobile at an ever-increasing rate, we decided to host a conference dedicated to mobile web development in parallel to the Dutch PHP Conference. Want to attend both events? Don’t worry, because with your DPC ticket you can visit the tracks at the DMC as well.

For more information, please check out the DMC website at http://www.mobileconference.nl/

Call for papers is open!
Speakers, the call for papers is now open! We’re looking for high-quality, technical sessions from speakers who can cover advanced topics and keep our demanding audience inspired. Tutorials are 3 or 6 hours in length (note that 6 hours is our preference) and the standard conference sessions should be 45 minutes.

As always we’re excited about all kinds of different topics. You could say that as long as it’s somehow related to PHP and you’re really excited about it, we want to hear it! It doesn’t matter who you are, this event is all about technology. DPC has an established reputation as the best place to expand a developer’s skill set and improve existing practice, and that remains our focus this year.

(Note that the DMC will have its own CfP - see http://www.mobileconference.nl/call-for-papers for more information)

The call for papers is open until February 17th. You can send in as many proposals as you like, so start submitting your talks! If you are accepted as a speaker we’ll pay your travel costs, put you up in a hotel and give you a pass to the conference so you can join us during the event.

We’re very excited to see what you can come up with, and we’re looking forward to reading all the different proposals.

Your hosts,
The Ibuildings DPC team