Last year was my first API Platform Con, and it was an amazing experience. I heard good things about FrankenPHP and was able to get my first container migrated to FrankenPHP at the conference. It was that simple. I was blown away by the talk on the decentralized web and inspired by the possibilities that the decentralized web presents. I hope the stuff Pauline Vos presented there will become more mainstream soon. The great talks combined with the beautiful city of Lille and the very friendly community made it an amazing conference. I was quite happy to be invited back this year and am looking forward to being there again later this week.

So let me share the stuff that I’m looking forward to.

The subject of the opening keynote is still a surprise. The website states The subject of this conference will be announced shortly and I’m curious what it will be. Kevin is a great speaker though, so this will be good regardless.

Sergès Goma on devs becoming villains

I’ve seen this talk at Dutch PHP Conference and it is fantastic. It makes you think. I like it when talks make you think. It makes you laugh. I love it when speakers are able to put humour into a talk. Yes, this is one not to miss. Even if I’ve seen it before already.

The performance dilemma

Then it’s hard to pick. Both Allison Guilhem speaking on real-time message handling and notifications and Mathias Arlaud speaking on optimizing serialization in API Platform are really interesting subjects. I think I’ll wait until the last minute to decide which one to actually check out.

After lunch we’ll have another mystery keynote. I guess we should be there as well!

Admin generator!

Admin generators have been there since the early days of before symfony (yes, with a lowercase s back then) 1.0. And Francois Zaninotto has also been around that long. I’m really looking forward to Francois speaking about the API Platform admin generator!

Something something DDD

Yeah, next up I’m on stage, so I can’t check out the other talk in that slot. The other one is in French anyway, so I probably would’ve skipped on it anyway. My friend is not much better than croissant, chauffeur, Disneyland Paris, baguette.

Xdebug

I am, still, a very happy VDD (var_dump/die)-driven developer. I know I should do more with Xdebug. And who better than to hear from than Derick himself.

After the panel discussion it’s time for the community party. And given we’ll have a party, I’m not sure if I’ll be in time for the first session on Friday. I’ll try though because while I’ve played with FrankenPHP a bit, I’m not extremely familiar with Caddy, and in the first session Matt Holt will be talking about Caddy. So that could be very interesting!

One Billion?!

Florian Engelhardt will be doing some fun stuff with optimizing PHP in his experiment on processing a 1 billion row test file with PHP. That’s a lot!

It’s alive!

I’ve mentioned me playing with FrankenPHP already and Boas Falke will be talking about building stand-alone binaries using FrankenPHP. That is awesome!

Consume!

I work with a lot of API’s in all my projects, so I’m curious if Nicolas Grekas will be able to teach me what I’m doing wrong. He’s presenting his talk Consuming HTTP APIs in PHP The Right Way so I’m expecting a lot of shaking my head about how I’ve been doing this wrong the whole time.

Sylius!

My favorite e-commerce framework also has presence at API Platform Con, in the form of Łukasz Chruściel speaking on how they’ve handling migrating to API Platform 3. I’m working on a big migration project (although no API Platform), so it’s good to learn about how they handled this.

Laravel?

API Platform is a Symfony-based system, right? RIGHT? Well, apparently not. Perhaps the talk I’m looking forward to most is Steve McDougall’s talk on using API Platform within a Laravel application. I work a lot with Symfony, but I also work quite a bit with Laravel. Having a powerful tool such as API Platform available on Laravel projects is an excellent way to make Laravel projects even more fun. So yes, I’m really really looking forward to this one.

Lille

Having said all that, I’m also looking forward to visiting the beautiful city of Lille again. Last year on the Saturday after the conference I took a long walk through the city before driving back home. Lille is a fantastic city. Will I see you there?