Johannes Wachter
Johannes Wachter
Core Developer – Sulu GmbH
Sulu Core Developer and Open-Source Enthusiast.

Revisiting the SymfonyLive in London 2015

Daniel and I had the chance to attend the SymfonyLive in London this year. Our journey started in St. Margarethen (Switzerland), from where we travelled to Zurich Airport – and to the City of Symfony ;).

The London venue was a great place – with an awesome view over London Eye, Big Ben, Westminster and even the Shard.

The Opening Keynote

On both tracks the conference offered many interesting talks and well-known names – such as Seb Lee-Delisle, giving the opening Keynote "Getting artist with code". In his talk he inspired us to create art with code. He startet with an empty HTML document and a canvas – drawing animated rectangles on it. The so created effect was anything but boring! „The best particle effect in the world“ her argumented. And we totally agreed.

He accomplished his Keynote with a little game named „Clappy Bird“ (App): The applause of the audience controlles the height of the bird. We scored five points – setting a new record!

And the show goes on

After two lightning talks from sponsors (platform.sh and ezPublish) the program continues with Ciaran McNulty talking about „Building a Pyramid: Symfony Testing Strategies“. This topic cannot be missed on a conference like this one. We gained many inputs to implement in our daily work.

The last speaker before lunch break was Bernhard Schussek (@webmozart) – talking about the PulliPHP project (https://github.com/puli) and his vision.

The afternoon was equally interesting. For us Benjamin Eberlei (@beberlei) was a highlight of the day. In his talk he spoke about the strengths and weaknesses of Docitrine. His message was that Doctrine is build for 80% of the usecases and is absolutely useless fort he rest. Great talk and a absolute must see for all Doctrine users (stay tuned as we will provide a link to the video of the talk when ist published).

The final speakers before the closing Keynote was Mathias Noback (@matthiasnoback) about Hexagonale Architectur and Phil Leggether (@leggetter) about Real-time Apps & Symfony.

Finally ... the godfather of Symfony himself

In his closing keynote session Fabien Potencier shared his vision for Symfony 3.0 – and the reasons why his team has to be able to break backward compatibility. He also mentioned that one little mistake could crash the (Symfony) world … and he surely doesn't want that :).

Networking between the talks

Although we had no community booth to introduce Sulu this year, we took the chance to share our expertise with others and learn a lot from other projects.

The community event

After the conference SensioLabs-UK invited us to a community event near Trafalgar Square. "Walkers of the Whitehall", the name of the bar, sounded already promissing – and turned out to be as classy as we expected. Of course, we took the chance to make new contacts and to talk about Sulu. A few „London Stouts“ were very helpful in order to meet our goals. 

Thanks to a day off we explored the city and had a great time in London.

Conclusion

Beside many new contacts we gained a lot of new input for Sulu. Especially the talks about Doctrine and Real-Time Apps will affect our work on issues like "Inheritance" and WebSocket connection. Other topics such as architectural approaches or building a pyramid test will also influence future decisions.

Next year we hope that we will be in London again for another great conference with @SensioLabsUK!

Finally, I want to share the artistic skills of @angelsk. Her sketchnotes have been one of the top Tweets of the day.