At the end of August two of our PHP Developers attended the Laracon EU conference in Amsterdam. I caught up with David Sturrock to find out what we’ve taken from the event as a company and how we’ve been applying the knowledge gained since the conference.
Given that we’ve been using Laravel since November of last year and have been experimenting with various packages and techniques, we went to Laracon with a few speakers in mind. The talks that were particularly applicable to our projects were:
SHARING LARAVEL: BRING LARAVEL’S BEST ASSETS TO ANY PROJECT – MATT SHAUFFER
This talk gave us great ideas on how to make the most of Laravel without actually using it. The speaker started with an excellent point, almost a scare tactic, where he gauged how long it would take to rewrite any given project in Laravel from the ground up. Basically, take how long you estimate the length of the rewrite to be, add another, double that, then move up a unit of measurement, days to weeks for example, turning an estimate of 1 day into 4 weeks.
Taking this talk and some ideas gained from talking to other attendees at the conference, we’re encouraged to be a little more tactical about how we approach legacy projects. We’re currently working on moving some older projects to Laravel one component at a time, similar to some other attendees at Laracon, but a lot of Matt Shauffer’s points indicate that in future we may want to consider “Laravelizing” the code instead. He suggested using Composer and the Illuminate packages to improve your projects in the same manner as a rewrite without eating up as many resources.
DISCOVERING ELASTIC SEARCH – BEN CORLETT
This was definitely a talk we were eager to attend. We currently make use of Elastic Search in our monitoring system, having queries filtered by Elastic Search to display relevant error information from our apps spread across several different servers. We are by no means experts on it, however, and were curious to see the tips and tricks the speaker had to share.
He pointed out that Elastic Search scales exceptionally well horizontally. Some especially useful points came up when the speaker began to compare Elastic Search to SQL a little more, discussing the areas in which SQL fails but Elastic Search thrives. One of these was location-based searches, something we make use of in our analytics and for push notifications.
The speaker also explored an interesting use case that showed the flexibility of Elastic Search. In the use case the search parameters contained some required factors and some that were preferred but could offer some leeway if necessary. Elastic Search has a ‘score’ system which decides how relevant the results are to the search. The score can be ‘boosted’ if there are parameters that don’t need to be exact and to provide more results with lower scores. There are also ‘decay’ functions, where instead of ignoring results just outside of the parameter, as in SQL, we can decay the score the further we get from that point. The speaker gave an example of looking for hotels within 50 km of a specified point. Using decay we could extend this to have a ‘scale’ value of 10 km which would then provide results within 60 km but results within 60 km would be given a score of 0.5 instead of 1.0 for those within 50 km. This would mean that if the required parameters were met the search could include results found just outside of the location parameter as long as they continued to satisfy the other criteria.
THE CODE MANIFESTO : EMPOWERING OUR COMMUNITY – KAYLA DANIELS
Two of the less technical subjects, provided by people of technical backgrounds to help communicate them in a relatable way, were Kayla Daniels’s talk on the Code Manifesto and Ross Tuck’s keynote. Kayla Daniels focused on diversity in tech companies (or the lack thereof) and why that is. She spoke about problems she sees every day as a female developer and those faced by people she knows suffering from stress caused by discrimination. She provided a lot of points on what’s Okay and what’s Not Okay, which is always helpful to educate us and enable us to spot mistakes in our own behaviour as well as that of those around us. Ultimately her biggest point was to stand up to discrimination when you see it and follow these simple steps for a better work environment
THINGS I BELIEVE NOW THAT I’M OLD – ROSS TUCK
Ross Tuck gave an exceptionally inspirational keynote speech. He spoke about how we all got a little help to get where we are and that it’s important to remain open to the advice of those around us even as we get older and wiser. He ran through a step-by-step process describing how to take in advice. The message was strong: Learn from those around you. Combine their knowledge with yours and you will not only grow from it but improve your ability to help those around you. Now personally I’m still young and inexperienced enough to be accepting of advice in the first place but keeping Ross’s talk in mind I’ll be sure to remember that even 5 or 10 years from now I’ll still be learning from those around me.
SO WHAT DID YOU TAKE AWAY FROM THE CONFERENCE?
The conference as a whole has done a lot for me personally to improve the way I look at my code and how I plan and design my individual projects. Many of the speakers got me to think about the design of my code and unit tests. The talks gave a general overview of the state of Laravel and the PHP standards involved.
We spoke with several employees from different development companies to get a feel for how they’d been using Laravel, comparing this with our own work to help give us a good perspective of how well we’re doing with the framework. There were plenty of companies from the UK and Europe at the conference, coming from a variety of backgrounds, demonstrating all the different applications of Laravel and various other tools. Everyone has their favourites and they’re always eager to discuss and compare them.
I look forward to attending this conference again as well as others and recommend anyone interested checkout the LaraconEU Youtube channel and Twitter accounts for the full videos from the event.