Main meeting: Abstraction Satisfaction with Kayla Daniels

Note: This month, we're meeting on a Friday. We'll be back to our normal 2nd Wednesday schedule next month.

Writing code is full of sink holes. You might not know it immediately, but they're there waiting to grab you. These sink holes present themselves as problems to be solved. They pretend to be central to our applications. They steal our focus when they don't deserve it or they eat up huge blocks of our time with their inanity. They throw edge cases at us that take hours writing tests to account for. They're the bane of our existence. Or, they would be if we all recognized them for what they were.

Instead many developers take them in stride. It's just part of what we do, after all. But what if I told you that things like File storage and credit card processing weren't actually central to your application, but are really just implementation details? What if I could save you all the hours you spend manipulating dates, date ranges and strings?

Wouldn't life be easier?

Yeah, it would. This talk will explore a number of libraries that take all of these stuck points and abstract them away. Essentially, it's a big box of wheels that we can use, instead of recreating our own. Tools that help you get up and running faster, and with fewer headaches.

Our speaker this month is Kayla Daniels of NYC. Author of the CodeManifesto, co-creator of HackTheStigma, and host of the NoCapes podcast. She's a PHP Developer with a passion for clean code and strong communities.