Thoughts on Symfony Live London 2014
Team Deeson (Mike, Lizzie and I) headed up to Symfony Live last week.
It's a really interesting two-day conference which gives us a chance to meet people outside of the open-source Drupal community and share experiences on using the Symfony PHP framework to build websites and apps.
It was held in a fab location at the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre in London.
Understanding craftmanship
Marcello Duarte, a lead developer of PHPSpec, gave the opening keynote and focused on the importance of learning. It's just not enough to build things that work - we have to keep growing our knowledge as developers.
Marcello talked about how we learn and his words really caught my attention. He said that we go through three stages of learning: familiarity, confidence and intuition.
He pointed out that you can't skip these three steps or accelerate them. You can't teach best practice before you've got a basic understanding.
Doing more with less
David Zuelke, Director at Bitextender, closed the event and gave an amazing visual definition of ephemeralization, the idea that as we progress we can do more and more with less and less.
He demonstrated the concept in the real world with the evolution of the bridge (see the slides below).
As engineering knowledge and technology have progressed, we've been able to make bigger and stronger bridges but using less material. The theory says that eventually we should be able to cross a river without needing a bridge at all, ultimately by doing "everything" with "nothing". We might get a bit wet at the moment!
He then took this idea, and applied it to the world of information technology infrastructure, showing the move towards cloud concepts and eventually selling the idea of PaSS (platform as a service).
Find out more
To see the full line up of speakers, visit the Symfony Live website here.