amsterdam

Last week, I was at the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. I did a workshop on content management with Symfony with the CMF and a workshop as well as a talk on HTTP caching and the Varnish reverse proxy together with David de Boer. I will give a similar tutorial at PHP Summer Camp in Rovinj, Croatia and at PHP Conference Bulgaria in Sofia later this year. Let me know if you are interested in having me give this tutorial at your company.

A nice perk of talking at a conference is of course that I also get to attend the conference and see other talks. There was a couple of interesting talks I managed to attend in Amsterdam. Most notably was Implement Single Sign On easily with Symfony by Sarah Khalil from Sensiolabs, who explained the authentication process of symfony so good that I finally feel like I really understand what is going on. The talk on HTTP/2 was mainly interesting for its detailed analysis of what was cleaned up in HTTP/1.1 since RFC 2616. Another good talk was by Arne Blankerts on the Content Security Policy (CSP). And I really enjoyed Daan van Berkels talk on Ada Lovelace and the Analytical Engine, he made maths and assembler sound like fun! There was also a code night in which David de Boer and I hosted a FOSHttpCache session with the main outcome of providing reusable varnish configuration files for the features of the library, instead of copy-paste documentation.

Besides the conference, there was of course also time to visit the beautiful city of Amsterdam. I had not visited the Netherlands since I was a small child. I even found the time for a trip to Friesland, visiting Schiermonnikoog in the Wadden Sea and taking lots of pictures of sand and birds. On the way back to Amsterdam, I stayed at Leeuwarden to do a Symfony CMF introduction at PHP Friesland Usergroup.