Everything You Should Know About The PHP Master Series Vol 1 – Get Prepared To Ask Your Questions Beforehand!

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You Are A PHP Fan…

If you are reading this article, you are passionate about PHP and you are linked with PHP and The PHP Community in one form or the other. Just like me, you are eager to attend a PHP conference, wants to get excited about it, wants to meet, talk and get to know people that are part of this awesome community.

Down the recent couple of years, there has been an explosion in the birth rate of PHP Communities either in the form of PHP User-groups or in the form of recurrent and consistent quality PHP Conferences all over the globe. More than ever before, PHP fans and PHP Members are motivated to stay united, to evangelize and propagate PHP everywhere.

A PHP Fan Deprived Of Overseas’ Conference Accessibility – Oh Wait.. An Opportunity, Bingo!

PHP Master Series Vol 1
PHP Master Series Vol 1

Unfortunately, just like me, you are not able to attend PHP conferences overseas due to so many reasons (travel/booking costs, no day-off from fulltime job..etc). How much of a frustration that is, I don’t know for you but for me it’s really something very sad! I’m someone who wants to mingle and jingle in those PHP fiesta.

But FORTUNATELY, for people like us, there’s a savior in the form of an awesome personality – I named Mr Cal Evans who is more than ever the undeniable Icon Of The (our?) PHP Community. This man has done everything possible to re-group all the best talks around the globe onto ONE virtual platform accessible to ALL of US. In this attempt, @CalEvans has brought forward a first volume of PHP Master Series. You can read about the announcement from Cal’s Blog here!

When, Where?

Why PHP Master Series

  • It’s ONLINE – preventing you from going abroad or spending money on flights or hotels to attend conferences. This one is right from your pc/browser. Sit back, take a chill drink and enjoy the show.
  • it’s brought forward by Mr Cal Evans – The Icon Of PHPc. His events are PROVEN successful ones – Enough said!
  • Bringing you The Best of the best talks out there, right in front of your screen!
  • You will learn from people who are rocking the PHP world and who are prominent members of The PHP Community
  • Ask instant questions! This is your chance to chat and ask questions
  • Get to know people in the virtual room.
  • Say hi to Mr Cal Evans and the others

Overview Of The Talks For PHP Master Series Vol 1

  1. Designing Beautiful Software – by Matthew Weier O’Phinney
  2. Cryptography For The Average Developer – by Anthony Ferrara
  3. Javascript Best Practices & BackboneJS for the PHP Developer – by Ryan Weaver
  4. Your code sucks, let’s fix it. – by Rafael Dohms
  5. Building a Firehose – by Ian Barber
  6. From POX to HATEOAS, A Real Company’s Journey Building a RESTful API – by Luke Stokes

Who Are The Speakers For PHP Master Series Vol 1

[Speaker #1] – Matthew Weier O’Phinney

[Speaker #2] – Anthony Ferrara

  • @ircmaxell – a veteran PHP specializing in Software Security, Performance, Quality and Architecture.

[Speaker #3] – Ryan Weaver

[Speaker #4] – Rafael Dohms

  • @rdohms – The rocking Brazilian PHP Evangelist, enabler of the AmsterdamPHP Community and founder of the PHP Usergroups @phpsp & @phpdf_ .

[Speaker #5] – Ian Barber

  • @ianbarber – A developer advocate for Google+. Ian has an amazing run of experience in the PHP world; he maintains the PHP extensions for libSVM – a powerful machine learning library based around Support Vector Machines, and LAPACK– a linear algebra library. He is also involved with the ZeroMQ messaging system community.
  • You can read more about him in my 7PHP Interview.

[Speaker #6] – Luke Stokes

  • @lukestokes – is The Co-founder and developer of FoxyCart.com which is an e-commerce system to help developers create flexible, powerful, custom ecommerce in less time, while equipping merchants with the fastest checkout flow available to their customers.

Sneaky Preview: What Will The Speakers’ Topic Be About + Helping You Prepare Your Questions Before-Hand

[Speaker #1] – What Will Matthew Weier O’Phinney Be Talking About

>> Concerning your topic, can you briefly highlight what people can expect to learn from it, any pre-requisites and the intended audience

My hope is to inspire PHP developers to stop thinking of coding as a means to a paycheck, and to begin thinking of programming as a craft. The intended audience is any PHP developer, and the only prerequisite is that you have written a program at some point or another, and that you’re at least aware of object orientation and PHP’s implementation of it. If you’re aware of design patterns, those will help you follow along better; however, you shouldn’t necessarily need prior knowledge of them to do so.

>> For people who like to participate actively, can you help them do some kind of “pre self-brainstorming” about your topic by pointing them to some hints or sources? (This will hopefully help them ask better questions)

My talk is primarily “food for thought,” and is intended as a jumping point for discussion. If you want to grab some “bad code” you have available and ask questions on how one might make it better, that could be interesting if we have time. Otherwise, I expect questions will arise from the content.

>> Things that people are going to miss if they do not attend the session

Are you writing the same code day in and day out? Are you having trouble adapting old code for new purposes? Do you struggle with making code testable? Do you get frustrated with APIs you’ve created — are they too verbose, or too terse? These are all topics I will touch on and try and give concrete examples of how I address these when coding.

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

Often during a presentation, something the presenter says or has an image for will spark your curiosity, and lead to questions or discussions that can happen right then, with the presenter; clearly, you miss out on such an opportunity when time-shifting the content.

In this particular presentation, the first 1/4 – 1/3 is purely anecdotal, and the slides are simply “props”; in viewing them offline, you miss the story I’m telling during this segment. And that story is the kernel of this presentation, what binds it together.

>> A word about This new idea brought forward by Cal Evans

I attend between 3 and 6 conferences most years. Almost every single one has at least one session that stands out and makes me think (good conferences have many!). My impression is that Cal is trying to hand select those in order to bring together in one day some of the best content from the year.

So, enjoy the other sessions — I’m pretty sure mine is here as a fluke. 🙂

[Speaker #2] – What Will Anthony Ferrara Be Talking About

>> Concerning your topic, can you briefly highlight what people can expect to learn from it, any pre-requisites and the intended audience

Attendees will get a glimpse into modern cryptography and learn the basic principals that guide it. Since cryptography is a field that a developer could spend years studying and not be an expert, this talk aims to provide enough knowledge to understand what’s going on.

As far as pre-requisites and the intended audience, there really aren’t any. The talk shows very little code, and mostly talks about principals. It’s aimed towards developers of all skill-sets, from experts all the way to first time developers.

>> For people who like to participate actively, can you help them do some kind of “pre self-brainstorming” about your topic by pointing them to some hints or sources? (This will hopefully help them ask better questions)

Well, since this is aimed at beginners, I’m not sure there’s much pre-research to do. Here are a few resources:

>> Things that people are going to miss if they do not attend the session

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

Well, watching a video offline and reading slides are going to have vastly different experiences from each other, and then from participating live.

If you just read the slides, you’re going to miss out on a lot of connecting tissue of the presentation. The key points are in the slide, but there’s a lot of material that I talk about that isn’t in the slide.

If you’re watching the video offline, you’re going to miss out on the opportunity to ask an insightful question and give feedback live as the presentation is happening. Watching a video is little more than a dictation of information. Participating in a live talk gives you the ability to get what you want to get out of a talk. For example, if the content is moving too quickly, you could ask to slow down. If you have a question after slide 2 (that you didn’t understand), you have the ability to understand before the ideas build…

>> A word about This new idea brought forward by Cal Evans

I think this is a fantastic idea. One of the biggest struggles with the community is that a lot of developers don’t attend conferences. There are a number of reasons for this, but two of the most prominent are that they can’t afford it and that there are no local conferences to them. This solves both problems, in that it’s inexpensive (for getting live content) and local to everyone!

Couple that with the fact that the talks are from the “best of the year”, and you have a really awesome conference that opens doors to people all over the world.

[Speaker #3] – What Will Ryan Weaver Be Talking About

>> Concerning your topic, can you briefly highlight what people can expect to learn from it, any pre-requisites and the intended audience

My topic is all about something we probably touch everyday: JavaScript, specifically jQuery. No, we’re not going to talk about the basics of jQuery selectors or any of the real basics. Instead, we’ll talk about the tricky bits of JavaScript and jQuery that you may have seen before, but weren’t sure about. For example, do you know what jQuery delegate events are? Or how the jQuery live() function (now deprecated for something else…) works? What about the event object that’s passed to you when listening to a click event? What’s the difference between the currentTarget, target and delegateTarget?

Prerequisites are basic understanding of jQuery + JavaScript, because our goal will be to clear some of the mystery up and push your JS skills one big step forward.

>> For people who like to participate actively, can you help them do some kind of “pre self-brainstorming” about your topic by pointing them to some hints or sources? (This will hopefully help them ask better questions)

If you want to experience some of the things we’ll play around with, add a click handler to something, and `console.log` the event object that’s passed to that callback. Inside, you’ll see things like currentTarget, target, and delegateTarget, which we’ll explain. You should also look at the jQuery “on” function, which holds the key to attaching an even to anything in a way that mimic’s jQuery’s “live” function

>> Things that people are going to miss if they do not attend the session

I wish I had seen this session 4 years ago so that someone could explain the mystery behind jQuery’s live function (hint: delegate events) and just how non-magical it is. Don’t miss this! We’ll also explain lots of weird JavaScript things in terms of PHP.

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

  1. When you participate live, you’ll always get a number of tips and tricks that the presenter thinks of as we’re moving through things. Often, these are the most valuable!
  2. You get to ask those burning questions!
  3. Ability to heckle? 😀

>> A word about This new idea brought forward by Cal Evans

Conferences are GREAT fun – you should definitely find and attend one soon if you haven’t before! But, we’re also all very busy, and sometimes conferences can be expensive. The idea of bringing some of the best talks out to the web for a grater audience is just an easy win in my book 🙂

[Speaker #4] – What Will Rafael Dohms Be Talking About

>> Concerning your topic, can you briefly highlight what people can expect to learn from it, any pre-requisites and the intended audience

“Your code sucks, let’s fix it” is much more about teaching people about quality code and training them to spot it then it is about criticizing their code. This talk follows two lines to put you on the way to being more aware of your code and its possible problems: Object Calisthenics and Code Readability. Both topics are based on existing books and research available on the internet. Object Calisthenics is a list of small “mental exercises” that will help you notice bigger issues in your code (think of SOLID and STUPID) by making you pay attention to smaller characteristics of your code. Alongside with these I also throw in a bunch of readability tips that will make your code easier to read and understand.

This talk is intended for every developer out there who writes code, even if its a one man team, the biggest victims of poor code and unreadable code is “future you”.

>> For people who like to participate actively, can you help them do some kind of “pre self-brainstorming” about your topic by pointing them to some hints or sources? (This will hopefully help them ask better questions)

I would suggest getting familiar with SOLID and STUPID, these concepts will help you see the benefits of what i’ll be talking about. This is a good source http://nikic.github.com/2011/12/27/Dont-be-STUPID-GRASP-SOLID.html

>> Things that people are going to miss if they do not attend the session

If you miss this talk you will surely miss out on producing better code and training yourself to identify possible problems which will give you problems with code maintainability, testability and reusability.

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

This talk usually sparks a few discussions, some of the points I hit are a bit “harsh”, this discussion is very valuable to see the reasoning behind some of the points.

>> A word about This new idea brought forward by Cal Evans

This is a great initiative by Cal Evans. Having come from Brazil I know of a lot of developers who simply do not have access to the big international conferences due to the costs, making this content available to them is a huge benefit for them all, i’m really glad to be part of it.

[Speaker #5] – What Will Ian Barber Be Talking About

>> Concerning your topic, can you briefly highlight what people can expect to learn from it, any pre-requisites and the intended audience

I’m going to be talking about how to build interesting systems that let you process large stream of data – what some people call a firehose – using PHP. It’s more of an architectural talk where we discuss a how to plug a bunch of small components together to create a flexible processing system with reliable end-to-end performance.

>> For people who like to participate actively, can you help them do some kind of “pre self-brainstorming” about your topic by pointing them to some hints or sources? (This will hopefully help them ask better questions)

Well, for an example Twitter built their firehose as a stream of all the tweets that are being sent, augmented by data about the user sending the tweet, and bits of metadata such as the geolocation at the time it was sent and so on. If people can think of any small, regularly created pieces of information in their own systems, then hopefully they’ll be able to see some uses for the system.

>> Things that people are going to miss if they do not attend the session

This session is a chance to see some ideas around a slightly different sort of architecture than the batch systems we more commonly use or hear about.

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

Mainly its the chance to ask questions! I always find that the use cases people ask about are way outside the ones I have previously thought of, and it’s great to be able to hear some of their thoughts and point them towards useful resources if I can!

>> A word about This new idea brought forward by Cal Evans

It’s great to see Cal picking some of his favorites over the last year and putting together this event, and I’m really honoured to be on the list with some great talks by some great speakers. I hope this will turn into a regular event!

[Speaker #6] – What Will Luke Stokes Be Talking About

>> Concerning your topic, can you briefly highlight what people can expect to learn from it, any pre-requisites and the intended audience

API’s are how businesses of the future will survive and thrive. The best software architectures for building APIs are constantly evolving (Middle Ware -> SOAP -> RPC -> REST Hypermedia) and as a web professional, you need to stay up to speed with what you’ll be using in the years to come. The intended audience includes those who are serious about web development and want to know more about or see a real-world example of a real REST Hypermedia API.

>> For people who like to participate actively, can you help them do some kind of “pre self-brainstorming” about your topic by pointing them to some hints or sources? (This will hopefully help them ask better questions)

I spent quite a bit of time researching various resources on REST, many of which I documented here earlier this year: http://bestoked.blogspot.com/2012/02/restful-resources-required-reading.html You can also view the documentation for the API we’ll be exploring: http://wiki.foxycart.com/v/0.0.0/hypermedia_api which includes links to our custom HAL Browser (https://api-sandbox.foxycart.com/hal-browser/hal_browser.html#/), Interactive Link Relationship diagram (https://api-sandbox.foxycart.com/hal-browser/) and PHP HyperClient (https://github.com/FoxyCart/HyperClient)

>> Things that people are going to miss if they do not attend the session

They may never know what makes an API a “REST” API and why Hypermedia is so important and beneficial.

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

Collaboration within community is one of the most important ways to learn. The relationships you’ll build learning with other professionals may prove to be more valuable than you previously considered.

>> A word about This new idea brought forward by Cal Evans

I’m privileged to call Cal a friend, and I’m honored to be included in this event. Cal works tirelessly to help build and educate the PHP community, and he does it with creativity. Not everyone can afford to travel and attend a conference, but many can pop open a laptop right where they are at. I’ve been to Day Camp for Developer events before and they are excellent because Cal cares about making them so.

About The Event’s Platform

  • PHP Master Series Vol 1 will be hosted online using the Eventbrite’s platform – if you are new, read the EventBrite’s Help corner
  • Payments are done, usually, via Paypal. Once payment done, you will get a confirmation receipt, your ticket and a link to the virtual room.
  • You can use any OS platform – so far I have used it with both Windows and Linux and I think even Mac Users did not have any issue.
  • Browsers – I have tried with Firefox and Chrome, so far no issue.
7php is attending phpmasterseriesv1

How To Communicate With PHP Master Series Vol 1 Fellow Members

  1. Using facebook, the event’s page is here http://www.facebook.com/events/350105581753455/ 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. Timely allowed, inbuilt chat system inside Eventbrite to ask questions

That’s All Folks – Go REGISTER NOW!!

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  • Well, I hope this article has helped you in making an informed judgement about your decision to register for this awesome session and if you plan to attend (which you should), this will help you prepare your questions intelligently beforehand.
  • PHP Master Series Vol 1 presents a unique and priceless chance – sign up for the cheapest way to become a better developer!

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Help Further?

1) Help diffuse this article to the PHP ecosystem – Share, tweet and spread the word to your audience ==> That would be a FREE way to thank me 😉

2) LIKE 7PHP dot COM on FaceBook – if you appreciate what I do

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