#DC4D Brings You Debugging Beyond The var_dump() Approach

‘A Lil bit’ About #DC4D, And May Be ‘A Lil bit’ more..

Oh wait, what’s #DC4D you ask? Let me tell you that you are doing it wrong if you don’t know about it! Aye elePHPant!!

Day Camp 4 Developers is a virtual ‘mini’ PHP conference. Meaning you can watch in realtime 5 awesome speakers, talking about some cool quality stuffs, while you are comfortably seated on your sofa with your snacks and beverages.

Gaining PHP knowledge, getting to know the speakers, chatting with everyone else attending on our virtual hallway track which is the #DC4D IRC channel on freenode, teasing Cal Evans, seeing Michelangelo brewing his next set of coffee while deploying something quickly and giving some cool feedback (I don’t know how he does all that, after all he’s one of the Green PHP Ninja Turtles), seeing the fun geeky conversation going on between the PHP rockstars, helping someone fixing their audio issue, meeting new friends, (and so much more fun times)…etc THAT’S what’s #DC4D!

If you are not part of it, if you are not part of us, you should be questioning about your PHPc-fanboi-ism! 🙂

It’s a new week on our PHP Calendar, specially in our Virtual PHP calendar – it’s THE week for DC4D which will be held on this upcoming Friday 18th Sept 2015 – see it all here, click!

One very important thing to know, DC4D is heartily brought forward by our PHP Icon – the one and only Mr Cal Evans, together with his wife, The Lovely & Talented Kathy.

This pic above, is a pic I hold dear to my heart – I was honored to have been able to meet them in person in Miami 2015 and taking a picture. Cal/Kathy THANK YOU for ALL you do for us, #PHPc!

DC4D – The Interview With The Organizer Cal Evans

>> Hi Cal, DayCamp 4 Developers has been very consistent in its events down the recent years with another one ahead of us this week. Can you tell us how it all started?

Heh, Day Camp 4 Developers started as a one-off event. I had an idea for another project and I needed funding. So I decided to get a few friends together and do a virtual conference. It didn’t even have a title other than Day Camp 4 Developers. The other project never did get off the ground, but Day Camp 4 Developers now runs 3-4 events a year. 🙂

>> How do you go out to find speakers & how do you plan the ‘theming’ of each events?

I usually have an idea (e.g. Debugging) or I see someone do a talk at a conference and really like it, so I build a Camp around it. For this one, I watched social media for a while and realized a lot of people were talking about debugging. I did some research and found that there were some pretty cool talks out there on the topic. So I reached out to the speakers.

>> The Year, the first one started?

2009 was the first one.

>> What are the challenges involved in hosting an “online mini conference” like DayCamp 4Developers?

TIMEZONES! I suck at TimeZone math. Also, technology. The Internet is not exactly what you call a stable medium. So many things could go wrong. In the early days I would have a MiFi hooked up and running in case my Internet went out. These days it’s more a matter of making sure the speakers have a good quality connection.

>> Is there any similar online PHP events so far?

I used to do something like Day Camp 4 Developers when I was at php architect. However, since I left, I think they have discontinued their series.

So in the PHP space, I THINK we are it. (Not that I am complaining) 🙂 Oh, while php[architect] does not run their series anymore, they are our partner in this one and we hope they will continue to be for a long time to come.

>> As an organizer of this event, one specific thing you have observed?

We get a much more geographically diverse group at Day Camp 4 Developers than you usually see at a PHP conference. It is one way that the community can get together world-wide and share.

Overview Of The Talks

1. PHP Profiling, an Introduction by Fabien Potencier (creator of Symfony)
2. Debugging: Past, Present and Future by Derick Rethans (creator of Xdebug)
3. Characterization Testing for Legacy Applications by Paul M. Jones (creator of AuraPHP)
4. Modern Tools for API Debugging and Testing by Neil Mansilla
5. Don’t Reboot, Debug! by Joshua Thijssen

A Quick Chat With Joshua Thijssen | One Of The Speakers

>> Your motivation behind this talk

The days of a programmer doing “simple” programming is long gone. There is no such thing as a simple PHP application and even generic LAMP stacks are getting rare.

And because things are getting more complex, we need to know more on how to fix things when they go wrong. Simply shutting down a virtual machine, or “upping” your development vagrant image might seem to “fix” the problem, but in the end, the problem is still there: you just silenced it for a while.

And this is something I see over and over again in small but also larger projects. Instead of figuring out what exactly goes wrong, we just reboot the server or development machine in the hope that it will work properly again. And since we are moving away to third party components (solr, redis, message queues etc), the problem isn’t always to be found
in your code.

So this talk is about trying apply some “medic first aid” to your (linux) environment for when things don’t work the way it should. What can we check? What are the (most likely) problem area’s, and how can we resolve them easily.

>> Any prerequisite before attending your talk?

The talk is based on a talk I occasionally present on conferences, but this time it will be more focussed on the developer who already works (a bit) with Linux. I will assume you will know a thing or two about the command line, but still I will try and keep it interesting for all levels.

>> One key thing that people will learn exceptionally from this talk

I hope people will discover some new tools, rediscover some already known tools, and find ways to quickly troubleshoot their systems if needed.

>> How can people reach out to you if they have questions later on as and when they practice what you will teach them?

I’m available on twitter (@jaytaph), email (jthijssen@noxlogic.nl), and most likely on a (PHP) conference nearby 🙂

>> Benefits of listening and participating LIVE VS Someone just reading the slides or just watching the video offline

It’s so much nicer when people actually participate in live events. I always like to think that a presentation should not be about a speaker telling a story to an audience (we have books for that), but about interacting with the audience on a storyline in order to discuss issues and solutions they want to know and hear about.

How To Communicate With #DC4D Fellow Members

1. Using facebook, DC4D FB Page –  Join it, and say a hi!
2. On the day of the online talks, Tweet with the #Hash tag: #dc4d
3. Get on irc.freenode.net, using the channel #dc4d
4. Tweeting to @daycamp4devs

That’s All Folks – Btw Win A Free Ticket

If you can buy a ticket, by any means do it as it’s a way to keep sustaining the efforts by DC4D initiatives.

But you can also participate in winning a FREE ticket.

How To Participate?

Reply to the following question on Twitter and include the hashtag #DC4D in your tweet.

Question: “Who is the emblematic PHP couple?”
Go tweet your answer! A random tweet will be drawn for the winner – All the best!