September | Encoding Explained + Debugging Self-Doubt

This September we’re lucky to have two fantastic speakers. Following his talk on hardware at Laravel Live UK this summer, Laravel scene regular Dan Johnson of TRYBE is giving us the lowdown on the dark art of encoding 🧙

To kick the evening off, software engineer Adria Figueres Garcia of Hove-based startup and PHP Sussex sponsor Tillo, will be giving a lightning talk on beating impostor syndrome.

The in-person event will take place at Runway East in Brighton from 6:30 pm (talk at 7 pm). There will be food and drinks courtesy of Runway East and Tillo – come have a chat before the talk! Afterwards we’ll head to Unbarred Taproom, 2 minutes walk from our venue, to wind up the evening over a craft beer 🍺.

Online participants can join the live stream from 7 pm.

Both speakers will be attending in person so please head down to Runway East IRL if you’re local and help give them a warm PHP Sussex welcome! 💜🐘🐘🐘

Encoding Explained
ASCII? ISO/IEC 8859? UTF-8? Character encodings are something we deal with every day, but we might not fully understand what they are, why they're important, and why we have so many.

This talk explains the history of character encoding and how they evolved. We'll learn about what they actually mean and why we need them, and we'll also learn about what considerations we need to make as PHP developers in order to make sure we deal with strings correctly, whether you're building a multi-lingual application or even just supporting emojis 👍

Debugging self-doubt: Beating impostor syndrome
Ever felt like you don’t belong in tech, that you're just one step away from being “found out”? You're not alone. In a world of ever-evolving frameworks and highlight reels on LinkedIn, impostor syndrome has quietly become a shared experience in the developer community.

In this lightning talk, we are going to explore the roots of impostor syndrome it's especially common in tech—and shares practical, thoughtful ways to reframe it. This talk invites us to see self-doubt not as a weakness, but as a sign of growth. Whether you're just starting out or deep into your career, you'll walk away with a few tools to help you rewrite the inner script—and maybe even help others do the same.

Big thanks to Silicon Brighton, Tillo and Runway East for their support.
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