January meetup

🏢 Location: Delaware - Building 'Pégoud, Amelia Earhartlaan 10, 9051 Gent
🍽️ Come hungry: we'll have food and drinks
👍 We have a limited amount of spots, so only RSVP when you are sure you'll be able to make it.

Schedule
19:00 - Doors (food and drinks available)
19:40 - Rector: The Way You Can Finally Upgrade PHP by Bram Van der Sype
20:30 - Things I wish I knew when I started programming by Brent Roose
21:15 - Socializing
22:?? - End of meetup

Talk 1: Rector: The Way You Can Finally Upgrade PHP by Bram Van der Sype

Abstract: PHP has been around forever, and so has some of it's code written back in dark ages. Legacy projects can feel like archaeological digs and refactoring these, or even just keeping large PHP projects up to date, can be a daunting task. This is where Rector comes in, to help you get the most out of the code you already have. Spend less time doing menial sh..tuff and more time actually building things.

Bio: Bram Van der Sype is a software engineer with over 20 years of experience in web development, primarily with PHP. Nowadays, he focuses on modernizing existing codebases using tools like Rector to keep long-running projects maintainable.

Talk 2: Things I wish I knew when I started programming by Brent Roose

Abstract: Brent fell in love with code when he was twelve. Looking back, young him didn't know many things about programming, and there were many struggles to wade through during the first years of his professional career. A year or two ago he got confronted with what felt like yet another new reality: the rise of AI, and especially his struggles with it.
In this talk, Brent looks back at the things he wish he knew fifteen years ago and how that knowledge can help him (and hopefully you) find stability in what feels like a new era of programming.

Bio: Brent has been programming for over 17 years; he is a developer advocate for PHP with JetBrains; the author behind stitcher.io; the author of three educational programming books: Laravel Beyond CRUD, Front Line PHP, and Event Sourcing in Laravel; the author of Timeline Taxi, a short sci-fi novel; and finally, the creator of PHP framework Tempest.

We look forward seeing you at our meetup!