Chicago Symfony & React Meetup - Speakers: Larry Garfield, David Wnek

We are looking to continue the momentum of our Chicago Symfony & React Meetup! All are welcome.

This meetup is sponsored by 2 Chicago area companies that rely heavily on the Symfony framework and components and want to build a strong community of Symfony developers to share knowledge and grow the local Symfony community.

• Caxy (www.caxy.com)
• International Code Council (www.iccsafe.org)

The event will be held at Caxy's office located in the loop:
212 West Van Buren Street
Suite 1000 (Floor 10)
Chicago, IL 60607

This month we have two excellent speakers and topics!

Larry Garfield - Make your code do your job
Description:
Throughout history, advancement has come from reducing the amount of work that needs to be done by humans and letting technology do it for us. Long before computers, humans were letting our technology work for us in order to make ourselves better.

So too with programming. We have the ability in PHP, as in many languages, to make the language syntax itself find bugs for us. It's called "types", and is a far too under-utilized part of the language. Even many seasoned developers don't realize the benefits that come from having strict, explicit types in their code rather than relying on haphazard "duck typing".

This talk will make the case that your best way to improve your productivity as a developer is to make your language itself do your work for you. With PHP 7's improved typing support that is now even easier than ever.

Links:
https://twitter.com/Crell
https://www.garfieldtech.com/

David Wnek - Building an Admin Backend with Sonata Admin
Description:
A walk-through of using Sonata Admin with Symfony for an Admin Console/ Backend. What it is and how to use it, helpful tips and gotchas that are tough to find in the documentation, and then some of the more advanced customization that can be done with it and how to do it.

I work at a digital agency that specializes in Symfony, and we use Sonata Admin on almost all of our Symfony projects - especially with decoupled applications. We have found it to be a powerful and efficient tool for ourselves, and I'm looking forward to being able to share what I have learned so that it can become one of your favorite tools as well.

The one complaint I always hear about using Sonata Admin is the lack of documentation - so my hope with this talk is to bridge that gap and encourage people to pick it up, and perhaps help improve the docs along the way!