February meetup @ MCS

Our annual conference is over and we'd like to keep the momentum going by organizing our first meetup in 2015.

On February 24th we'd like to invite you to Wilrijk where our good friends at MCS (http://mcs.fm/) will be opening up their conference room.

http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/3/9/f/0/600_228014832.jpeg

This is the 2nd time we will be at MCS and we're very grateful for that. Joeri Sebrechts (https://twitter.com/joeri_s) who works at MCS will be doing one of the presentations. You might remember Joeri from his recent appearance at our conference (https://conference.phpbenelux.eu/2015/grid-portfolio/strange-strings/). It's safe to say we're very excited and curious to see what he has in store for the next meetup.

Schedule

• 19:00 - 19:30: Welcome & Drinks

• 19:30 - 20:30: Long live the codebase (by Joeri Sebrechts)

• 20:30 - 20:45: Break

• 20:45 - 21:45: Comparing Composer (by Hannes Van De Vreken (https://twitter.com/hannesvdvreken))

• 21:45 - 22:00: Announcements & Raffles

• 22:00 - ??:??: Networking & drinks

Long live the codebase

Some codebases are used for mere months, but some have to live for decades. Knowing that each line of code you write may some day be old enough to drink and still in active use is humbling, and it skews how you would otherwise look at code design. Here are some practical tips which we at MCS have picked up over the years for dealing with long-lived codebases.

About Joeri

Joeri Sebrechts is the lead web developer at mcs.fm, a software and services vendor specializing in real estate, facility and workplace management. He has been spearheading the effort to deliver a large enterprise web application suite used in over 60 countries. He is always trying to figure out better ways to build software, and has never met a piece of software that couldn’t be improved further. He is a local Antwerp resident who lives together with his wife, son and cat, but not necessarily always in that order.

Comparing Composer

This talk will compare composer with npm, bower, bundler, pip, berkshelf,… and their ecosystems of packages. Compared to these, composer is excelling with some pretty awesome features. I will focus on the great advantages of composer. Things like virtual packages, custom scripts, calling static methods straight from composer.json, the replaces keyword, … Stuff that most people don’t know about because they don’t always have to use it, but it could help them if they would know about it. At last I will tell about what the packagist ecosystem can learn from other ecosystems, and how package developers can work together to further improve it.

About Hannes

My name is Hannes and I'm working as a web developer at madewithlove. I'm one of the creators of Ghendetta. I try to contribute to as much PHP projects as time allows me and I use Laravel on a daily basis. I enjoy going to meetups, organising meetups and speaking at meetups. Recently I started the brand new php.gent meetup group and I also started the MongoDB Belgium meetups 12 months ago.