Nuclear Powered Software Security & Getting Started with Xdebug

★ Nuclear Powered Software Security – Chris Riley (https://twitter.com/giveupalready)

It seems to be almost a weekly occurrence that another company makes the news headlines for being hacked and in the process disclosing sensitive user data and company secrets. These security meltdowns can cause catastrophic effects to the company in lost user trust and huge costs putting things right.

A nuclear power plant is considered one of the most dangerous things mankind has built, yet they very rarely go wrong. The systems engineering that goes into making nuclear power plants safe is a fascinating topic to study but on the surface it seems entirely irrelevant to PHP developers.

In this talk I’m going to show you how this level of safety is achieved, what happens when it goes wrong and then see what lessons we, as PHP developers, can learn from it to help us secure our applications from meltdown.

★ Getting Started with Xdebug – Liam Bowers (https://twitter.com/liam_bowers)

Xdebug is an extension for PHP to assist with debugging and development. It contains a single step debugger to use with IDEs; it upgrades PHP’s var_dump() function; it adds stack traces for Notices, Warnings, Errors and Exceptions; it features functionality for recordig every function call and variable assignment to disk; it contains a profiler; and it provides code coverage functionality for use with PHPUnit.

https://xdebug.org/ is an essential tool for PHP development. Liam will show us how to get it up and running.

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★ You do the intro!

For you to get the taste for public speaking we're asking one of the attendees to do the event introduction. You'll speak briefly about the sponsors, any announcements, and talk about the next event - it'll take less than 5 minutes, but may help to ease your fear of public speaking! If you're interested in doing this please tweet @leedsphp (https://twitter.com/leedsphp). We'll send you the slides beforehand with a few points to mention. The rest is up to you!

★ We need your help.

If you've attended LeedsPHP we want to hear from you. We have 6 questions (3 mins) that will help us make future events better: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DQHN9QT

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★ Sponsors

Our sponsors make this monthly event possible, so please take the time to check them out, and thank them for their support.

• Futurelabs (http://futurelabs.org.uk/) – Are a not-for-profit formed to help provide a focal point for tech start-up and scale-up businesses in and around Leeds. Futurelabs offer hot desking, fixed desk space or larger office spaces for tech businesses at very reasonable prices. @LeedsFuturelabs (https://twitter.com/LeedsFuturelabs)

• Sky Betting & Gaming (http://skybetcareers.com/about-us) – A tech company born out of Sky, and are aiming to be the UK’s best digital business. 1000+ colleagues, developing some of the country’s biggest brands in online betting and gaming. Their careers page (http://skybetcareers.com/) provides great detail as to the working environment and range of work available across the technology stack. @skybetcareers (https://twitter.com/skybetcareers)

• Infinity Works (https://www.infinityworks.com/) – Infinity Works offer an unparalleled skillset across a broad range of engineering disciplines and business specialisms, making them capable of helping to deliver any project and overcome any challenge. Some areas of work are project & product delivery, Managed Services, Organisational Optimisation, Consulting, and Training. They also offer great careers for leading Engineers and Technologists. @InfinityWorks (https://twitter.com/InfinityWorks)