Talks: Rector beyond upgrades & Networking Fundamentals for Developers
Details
After a six-month hiatus, our meetup for the Oxford and Reading dev community is finally back — refreshed, growing, and now with two new organisers joining the team!
This edition is a special one-off: it takes place in Reading on a Monday, just 3 days after PHP UK and we have not one, but two talks! It's a great chance to keep the momentum going, catch up with familiar faces, and meet new ones.
Future meetups will return to our regular Wednesday evening slots.
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1️⃣ Rector Beyond Upgrades: Transforming Your Workflow by Dave Liddament
Rector is a tool best known for upgrading and refactoring PHP codebases, but its potential goes far beyond that. What if you could make Rector a key part of your everyday development workflow?
In this talk, Dave will explore how to unlock Rector's full capabilities to automate repetitive tasks, enforce team-specific coding standards, and ensure consistency across the project.
He will also dive into creating custom Rector rules tailored to your unique project needs. By the end of the talk you'll have with actionable steps to make Rector part of your development team.
About the speaker: Dave is software engineer, international conference speaker, and Open Source Software author. With over two decades of experience in the tech industry, he worked on many long-running, successful projects, owner and director of Lamp Bristol.
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2️⃣ Packets, Protocols and PHP: Networking Fundamentals for Developers by Jessica Smith
Whether you're building APIs, deploying microservices, or just curious about what happens beneath the surface of your applications, understanding networking is essential.
Jessica's talk explains the core concepts of networking - from the basics of TCP, UDP and the OSI model, to more advanced topics like routing, BGP and anycast. You'll gain a practical understanding of how data moves across the internet, how routing decisions are made, and why these concepts matter when building scalable, resilient applications.
No prior networking experience required!
About the speaker: Jessica is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at DigiCert DNS and has been using PHP for 27 years with 18 years experience in the hosting industry.
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A big thank you to our main sponsor Humand Talent for supporting the Oxfordshire and Berkshire PHP community.
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Planned schedule of the evening:
- 18:30 – Arrival
- 18:55 – Rector beyond upgrades by Dave
- 19:35 – Break
- 19:45 – Networking Fundamentals for Developers by Jessica
- 20:30 – End of the event