Almost two weeks ago we had a pleasure to attend PHPers Summit 2018 – the biggest PHP conference in Poland. There were many great presentations (including 3 mentioning Sylius!), awesome networking and a lot of fun. Read the summary and make sure to visit this event next time.
First things first – we are really happy that this year every attendee could buy a ticket via Sylius-based system made by our partner BitBag. The process went smoothly and happened thanks to SyliusPrzelewy24Plugin, which is the integration with one of the most popular payment gateways in Poland. We hope that more and more online stores will use this solution in our country.
We are proud to say that Sylius workshops were sold on the spot and we had even accepted two extra attendees! There were a lot of people who wanted to learn the new eCommerce technology, including CTOs of big web agencies and even Magento trainers.
Konrad and Łukasz did a really great job, navigating new Sylius developers through the most exciting features like customizing Grids, creating new Resources and using Sylius Bundles. During 8-hour long workshop, attendees added a new component on top of Sylius-Standard: the Product Set. This new functionality allows grouping products into sets like menu or bundles. As the frosting on the cake, they also customised cart logic and added feature to put the whole set to the cart at once.
Year after year the event is growing and so is our participation. During this edition we shared the conference booth together with BitBag folks. Apart from many gadgets, we’ve had some delicious Sylius cupcakes.
What is more, we’ve also run a contest with a little PHP task. It brought us a lot of interest. There were many developers who wanted to check their PHP skills. For those who proposed the shortest version of the equation we handed in some valuable prices!
Overall there were around 100 people who tried and only 10 gave the right answer,
Task:
// Return true to win (the answer with the least symbols wins): function win($x): bool { $y = (int) NUMBER OF SYLIUS BUNDLES; return ($x >= $y) && ($x <= $y) && ($x !== $y); }
Write the solution in the comments and check if you can make it!
The impact of Sylius on the conference is growing every year. Apart from providing the ticket system, our framework was also mentioned in three (!) presentations.
“Command Pattern – how to handle complicated problems!” by Łukasz
Developing the Open Source Software is a great adventure and a constant opportunity to improve our skills. Therefore, one of the concepts we have tried recently was Command Pattern. While working with it during last year, we have decided that it is worth sharing gathered knowledge with others.
Many attendees agreed that proper decoupling between infrastructure and application layer can be beneficial for their apps. “People were delighted with the speech, admitting they would use this approach in current projects” – Łukasz said. “But some of the more advanced developers from our PHP community also said that they would like to hear about more complex aspects of Command Pattern usage. This is what I want to add to this presentation next time.”
“Behat revolution – or how we came back from hell” by Mateusz
In his presentation, Mateusz described our adventure with testing. As in Sylius we care a lot about code quality and proper code base, we want also to share our knowledge on these topics. “Feedback was great, people were very interested in our testing suite, wanted to catch the idea lying behind it”, said Mateusz, happy about the opportunity to share his experience about Behat. If you want to find out more about our testing approach, read this article.
“A f*ckup case study – implementing microservices to a new functionality of an existing app” by Grzegorz Stawarczyk
The third presentation was a history of a bad try implementing Sylius with microservices architecture to the existing system of Qpony – a very popular polish PHP shopping app. Fortunately, the speaker didn’t say a bad word about Sylius, but more about the wrong development attitude in this particular case.
In general, there were three lecture tracks. In this article, we focus mainly on our participation in the event. However, we would love to hear about other presentations that you enjoyed. If you want to mention some of them, please do it in the comments!
The conference wouldn’t be so successful if it wasn’t for a perfect organisation. Huge kudos go here to Sebastian Dudek and Konrad Siamro – this duo of PHP enthusiasts has managed to bring the best event of its kind in Poland. This is even more impressive if you think they started three years ago with no previous experience. Congrats, guys!
But why was it so special? Well, everything was there – starting from awesome sponsor stands (with computer games, retro insert-coin games, Thai ice-creams, coffee, drinks, snacks etc.) and ending on unlimited, high-quality barbecue food.
What’s also funny is that this time, the night before the conference we helped with preparing starter packs for all attendees. We are happy to be friends with event organizers and help them in any possible way.
To conclude, we would like to encourage you to attend the event next year. From what we know, organizers plan to open on foreign guests more and more. This year we had a few English lectures, but the next edition should contain much more. Come to Poland in June 2019 and see how strong we’ve become in PHP. 😉
EDIT: You can watch the after movie from the event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3ubiI8nktk
