If you can make it to Manchester, UK for October 7-9, 2011, then you should consider coming to PHPNW 2011. Buy tickets here.

The schedule looks fantastic. Sebastian Bergmann and thePHP.cc will be there. Also, from my limited experience with this conference so far, Lorna Mitchell and crew run a very tight ship, which has left me even more impressed and excited.

I am very excited to say I will be also be speaking at PHPNW

Are Your Tests Really Helping?

Developer testing can reduce debug time, serve as executable documentation, build confidence, expose questionable patterns running rampant in your code, and in general, increase the speed of development and deployment. Tests can also cost you time, sanity, and agility.

This session will not be the same old re-hash of the Misko Hevry talk on testability. Instead of a talk that is generic, syntactically translated from Java to PHP, and neglectful the major coding patterns prevalent in existing PHP 5 code bases, all of which results in the majority of the audience as un-sold, we will look at coding and testing patterns inspired by a real PHP project. We will also discuss how to identify patterns and make small adjustments where testing is and is not helping. The end result will be a toolbox of habits we can use to improve testability and forward momentum in development.

I do honestly appreciate the gold standard talks on “Clean Code” (“Thank you, sir”), but those talks are nearly four years, if not more, old.

PHP is the driver of websites that touch millions, if not hundreds of millions, of users, and it is about time everyone stops doing the same-old hand-me-down presentations outside of a new hire training or a college classroom, and I’m tired of it.

I will try my best to give a great talk that can leave the crowd excited to go home and re-assess what is and isn’t working in the production of his PHP product and where to go from there.

Now, back to writing a less promotional blog post.