January Event at Dual Stack

Dear members,
For the new year, our first event will be hosted at Dual Stack. We have two talks lined up for you. Jachim Coudenys will talk about "PHP OPCache, Realpath Cache and Preloading" and Freek Van der Herten will give his talk "Ditching MailChimp: How I'll save $1000/year".
Dual Stack is so kind of offer us sandwiches and soup!
We hope to see you soon,
Dries & Rias
PS: Please remember to change your RSVP if you cannot attend.
EVENTY
We're also happy to announce Eventy, a new platform for managing your events. Eventy is currently under construction but as soon as it's ready we'll be moving with the user group to our new home. Visit https://eventy.io to subscribe to the newsletter and follow the twitter account at https://twitter.com/eventyio to be the first to know when it launches.
SCHEDULE
19:00 Doors Open
20:00 Start Talks

TALKS
Ditching MailChimp: How I'll save $1000/year by Freek Van der Herten
A few years ago I started my personal newsletter. Currently, my list holds about 6000 addresses. For my personal use, MailChimp and its competitors are too expensive. That's why I'm building my own solution called Mailcoach (https://mailcoach.app).
In this talk I'll show you Mailcoach under the hood. We'll discuss how it was built, how it sends thousands of emails in a reliable way, how tracks opens and clicks, how it is tested, and much more, ...
Speaker: Freek is a PHP developer and package creator at https://spatie.be. He is also building https://mailcoach.app, blogging at https://freek.dev, co-organising https://flareapp.io, running https://ohdearapp.io and https://flareapp.io. Sometimes he speaks at meetups too.
Length: 30min
PHP OPCache, Realpath Cache and Preloading by Jachim Coudenys
Everybody wants quick applications. A lot of that speed can be gained by the way you write your software, but a big chunk has to do with the way PHP is configured. As PHP matured, it got quicker, it used less memory and it accumulated a lot of settings which can be tuned for performance.
The biggest, and often most misunderstood, features for performance are OPCache (introduced in 5.5) and preloading (introduced in 7.4). This talk covers how both features work, how you can take advantage of them on your servers and during deployments, and tries to show all the ini settings relevant for performance.
Speaker: Jachim Coudenys is a PHP developer at Combell. Since discovering PHP in 2002 (4.1.0), his work and after-work activities brought him from the world of development to server management, development workflows, more development, etc… Next to being a long-time member of PHPBenelux, he is co-organizer the PHP-WVL, a user group in West Flanders (BE). He is a Zend Certified developer and Certified MongoDB Developer & DBA. You can follow him on http://twitter.com/coudenysj and read his occasional blog posts on http://blog.jachim.be.
Length: 45min