It took me a while to really sit down and reflect on it, but March 13 was the day of Dutch PHP Conference aka WebDevCon aka AppDevCon. What I love about this threesome of conferences is that it isn’t limited to just PHP, while you can still enjoy a whole lot of PHP content. Funny enough though, my planning this year did not even include that much PHP. Yet I still had a blast and learned a lot. If you can ever make it to Amsterdam, take that chance. You won’t regret it.

The day started with PHP, and mostly the power of PHP today and tomorrow. Johan Janssens of Joomla! fame told us about the olden days of PHP including some key moments and key people. But then he switched to the now, and to the bright future of PHP. He went into FrankenPHP and what it means to PHP and what it could mean to PHP. About the possibility of distributing executables of PHP applications that can run without dependencies, without even having PHP installed. I know most of what Johan was saying, but it really boosted my morale. It confronted me with YES, PHP is awesome and it has a very bright future ahead.

Next up was my second and also last PHP-related talk of the day. How could I not go to a talk about another part of the future of PHP: PIE. This talk had a bit of a similar structure to the talk Johan just did. We got a bit of history (PEAR, PECL etc) but then moved on to the now and the future. PIE is a new installer for PHP extensions (say: PECL on steroids). James gave a clear overview of what it already can do and where it’s heading. This was very inspiring (to me) and really triggered me to try and make some time in the coming months to replace my PECL usage with PIE in several projects. This talk really made me feel YES, PHP is awesome and it has a very bright future ahead. Again.

Crime is bad. Let’s do crime. In How to Git away with murder, Sergès Goma presented her usual combination of serious learning with a great sense of humor. There is no way you’re ever going to fall asleep when Sergès is speaking. During this talk, we learned about some of the crimes of Git and version control, and ways to either avoid those, or get away with it. Good stuff to know for any developer.

After lunch, it was my time to hit the stage. I presented my sociocratic decision making talk in which I first present sociocracy in general and then zoom in on the sociocratic decision making method. I could elaborate but I’m planning to talk some time to write a full post on this subject at a later moment.

They always say silence is golden, right? Nope, wrong! Helvira Goma presented a very engaging talk on the power of music to support your work. I really wanted to see this talk because I have long ago realised how important music is for my ability to focus and perform certain tasks, but I had no idea about the science behind that. Helvira gave me exactly what I was hoping for: Explanations on why music helps (or well, can help, not everyone is the same) and even how different styles of music are a better fit for different types of tasks. I can now be more concious about this in the future.

The last talk of the day was Derick Rethans. A DPC regular and someone I really respect talking about a subject I also care deeply about: owning your content. Any content you post in one of the several big tech platforms, whether that is Xitter, Facebook, or any of the other big platforms is basically not yours anymore. It’s extremely hard to control that content: who reads it, where it goes, how it’s used. Derick introduced the ActivityPub protocol and the many applications that the Fediverse already offers as an alternative to big tech applications. As someone who made the move away from big tech (nope, not completely done yet) I really enjoyed Derick’s talk. On my personal blog, I also wrote about this topic. I really hope that Derick’s talk will inspire more people to join the fediverse and consider using more open platforms and protocols.

Concluding

Dutch PHP Conference was awesome as ever. It was very interesting to hear so much critique on usage of (generative) AI at a conference that started a sister conference on AI this year from both speakers and attendees. Having said that, most conversations on that topic were constructive and not simply bashing because of the bashing.

In terms of line-up, there were several timeslots where it was really hard to choose between different speakers. I really had FOMO several times during the day. That is a sign of an excellent conference with an excellent line-up.

Of course, I also spent some time in the hallway track, aka talking to people and visiting sponsor booths. There were some interesting sponsors this year to talk to. I really enjoyed my conversation with Rentman for instance.

I do have to conclude that from a social perspective, a single-day conference is really too short. There are so many people that I would’ve loved to catch up with that I only saw in passing or just could say “hi” to between talks and other conversations. This partially had to do with me as well, since I had very little time around the conference to hang out with people. Ah well. I’m sure I’ll see some people again soon(-ish). It was a wonderful day. I will certainly be there again next year.