With only a few more days to go until Dutch PHP Conference 2025 it’s time to look forward to the conference. DPC is always a good conference (and has always been so), but I’m going to put focus on some talks that I’m really looking forward to.

Sacred Syntax: Dev Tribes, Programming Languages, and Cultural Code

One of the best and most entertaining talks at DPC last year was by Serges Goma and was titled Evil Tech: How Devs Became Villains. In it, Serges put focus on ethics in software development in a very fun and accessible way.

With the great way that topic was approached I’m really looking forward to Serges’ take on tribalism, which is the subject of the talk this year!

Small Is Beautiful: Microstacks Or Megadependencies

Bert Hubert has been big in media in recent times talking about the EU dependency on US-based cloud providers, talking about the risks and even the potentially unlawfulness of doing that. However, Bert is also someone with a big history in tech, being the founder of PowerDNS.

In his closing keynote, he will talk about microstacks and megadependencies. I’m really curious to hear about this from Bert.

Don’t Use AI! (For Everything)

After my recent blogpost on AI I got a response from Ivo Jansch, one of the organizers of DPC but also a really smart person that I’ve enjoyed working with in the past, to attend this talk by Willem Hoogervorst. I am really looking forward to the considerations that Willem will be sharing on when to use AI and when not to.

Parallel Futures: Unlocking Multithreading In PHP

Multithreading and PHP is not a good combination? Apparently it is! Florian Engelhardt will be talking about ext-parallel and I do want to hear more. I’m intrigued!

Our tests instability Prevent Us From Delivering

I’ve seen this situation with several of my customers: tests that can not be trusted. Either tests turned out green when something was wrong, or tests would be red while everything was fine. I’m looking forward to hearing from Sofia Lescano Carroll on what can lead to this and how to mitigate this.