Summary of Confoo 2016

by Dave MacFarlane

ADM: March 4, 2016

Overall Impressions

  • Very good conference (polyglot conference about web development)
  • Would definitely go back next year
  • I'm just going give a really quick summary of the important things I learned from some of the talks I attended

12 Reasons Your API Sucks (Keith Casey)

  • "Time to hello world" important metric

Speeding Up The Web With PHP7 (Rasmus Lerdorf)

  • Benchmarks show speed of PHP7 is about twice as fast as PHP 5.6 (less benefit for database-bound applications)
  • Memory usage is drastically lower
  • At etsy they could turn off ~50% of their servers after upgrading to PHP7
  • PHP 7.1 will have JIT compiler

Speeding Up The Web With PHP7 (Part 2) (Rasmus Lerdorf)

  • Q1: Type exceptions are still runtime exceptions, not parse time exceptions (because typing is optional)
  • phan -- static analysis tool for PHP7 (not going to be included in php -l)
  • Q2: The AST is only available from the PHP runtime with an extension

PHPUnit 5, PHP 7 and Beyond (Sebastian Bergmann)

  • PHPUnit was able to drastically reduce the time to delivery by switching to semantic versioning (was ~1.5 years per release, now a release every 8 weeks)
  • One of the reasons for PHPUnit 5 is to add support for PHP7 and remove support for old legacy cruft still in PHPUnit, because you can't use new PHP features if you're still supporting old versionings

Rewriting 12-Year-Old Code (Anna Filina)

  • Summary of techniques to update legacy code
  • We're already doing a lot of them
  • 1 new idea: "Design Extraction"

You Don't Need JavaScript for that! (Ben Illegbodu)

  • content-before:, custom fonts, and :hover selectors let you do pretty interactive menus in pure CSS
  • HTML5 has input types which include validation for common cases (email, url, date, etc) and pseudo-selectors let you style them for valid/invalid states in pure CSS
  • CSS3 animations/transitions are pretty powerful
  • CSS flexbox is powerful (change rendering order, vertically or horizontally align things, etc)

Flexbox: Coming to a browser near you (Jen Kramer)

  • New, flexible method of doing layout in CSS
  • http://flexboxfroggy.com/
  • Supported in most browsers today
  • Probably going to be important for front end development in the future (see: next slide)

Level Up Your Team (Stefan Koopsmanschap)

  • It's hard to find good developers, because good developers already have jobs.
  • Even if you find good developers, things change so quickly in web development that in 6 months they might not be "good" if they don't keep up to date
  • Need a culture of learning and to invest in training
  • Management: "What happens if we invest in people and they leave?" Response: "What happens if we don't and they stay?"

Learn. Reflect. Repeat. (Melinda Seckington)

  • How to create a culture of learning?
  • Lightning Talks
  • HackDays
  • Other things in my notes

Deliver More, Stress Less with Kanban (Julia Wester)

  • Essentially a summary of the book "Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business" by David J. Anderson
  • Explanations of how it was used at the NBA

Decrease Conflict and Team Dysfunction (Sonia di Maulo)

  • An interactive exercise to come up with a code of "guiding priniples" for an organization/team
  • Having the "principles" that the organizational culture is based on written down helps integrate new people and decrease conflict in large teams

The end

(I have more notes on any given presentation that are beyond the scope of an ADM if you're interested)