Author: Stefan


  • We’re doing another thing. Three 1.5 hour sessions about different topics in which a panel will discuss the subject at hand and answer questions asked by attendees. The accompanying podcast will give you a nice reminder of the things that were discussed.

  • Dear recruiter

    An open letter to all tech recruiters out there on how to work with tech people.

  • Speaker support

    Speaker support

    Over all these years it has been very normal for conference speakers to not get paid for their effort, at least in the PHP community. But is that fair? With Comference, we’ve decided that we’ll reimburse speakers for their time.

  • Holiday project: Raspberry Pi NAS

    After recently buying a new BlueSound device we felt the need to expose our full digital music collection so we could easily listen to our music. Time for a NAS. It seemed overkill to go for a full Synology or similar setup, so we decided to do a nice little holiday project: my son and…

  • Check your SQL

    Check your SQL

    Recently I had to debug the bad performance of an API. Some calls took over 10 seconds. I immediately thought it might be related to SQL, but what I found surprised me…

  • symfony 0.6 to Symfony 5: What I learned from the framework

    Today I did a talk at SymfonyWorld about the lessons I learned from the Symfony framework. This blog post is a text version of my talk

  • Lessons learned from organizing an online conference

    Last week we organized Comference, an online conference from the comfort of your own home. Or office. Or wherever. This post contains some lessons learned.

  • Playing with WSL2

    Playing with WSL2

    I’ve been playing with Docker on WSL2, the new Linux integration for Windows, and Microsoft seems to have implemented a game changer for web development.

  • Cancelling WeCamp 2020

    Cancelling WeCamp 2020

    We’ve had to cancel WeCamp this year due to COVID-19, but we’re replacing it with something else

  • PHP and the DigitalOcean MySQL cluster

    One of the weak points in our Rancher 1 cluster has always been the database. Because databases and docker (due to the persistence issues) has always been an issue, we solved that by installing a MySQL server on the same droplet that our Rancher server was running on. While it worked fine, it was always…