June | Event Sourcing Your Way out of Trouble

Spring is here, the Spiegelten– er, Gardens are up, and our last PHP Sussex before the summer break is in!

On Wednesday 10 June, returning speaker Christopher Miller, Software Engineer and Podcaster at PHP Architect, will once more share his knowledge with us, this time on the topic of Event Sourcing.

We’re not live streaming events anymore, so be sure to join us at Runway East in Brighton from 6:30 pm (talk at 7 pm).

Event Sourcing Your Way out of Trouble

The talk explores the "Big Ball of Mud" scenario common in aging PHP applications, where side effects and buried state changes make debugging a nightmare. By introducing Event Sourcing, we move away from traditional CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) where the "why" and "how" of data changes are lost. Instead of just storing the current state in a database, we capture every business action as an immutable event. This creates a "Source of Truth" that allows developers to reconstruct the exact state of the system at any point in time, making it significantly easier to identify exactly where a legacy process went off the rails without digging through cryptic logs or messy if/else chains.

Once the root cause is identified, Event Sourcing provides a unique safety net for fixing problems. Rather than performing risky, manual SQL "hotfixes" on live data, we can leverage the Event Store to replay history and project it into new, corrected read models. This approach allows us to fix logic errors retrospectively, "time travel" through the application's history to verify the fix, and deploy with the confidence that our data integrity remains intact. The session focuses on practical strategies for incrementally strangling legacy PHP codebases, turning unpredictable bugs into repeatable, solvable sequences of events.

As always, we’ll have food and drinks (big thanks to our sponsor Jump24!), and plenty of time to chat with fellow developers. After the talk, we’ll head to Unbarred Taproom, a 2-minute walk from our venue, to wind up the evening over a craft beer 🍻.

PHP Sussex is supported by Silicon Brighton, Jump24, and Runway East.

Runway East has been fighting boring offices since 2014. Members get team bliss guaranteed, space to scale and Big Desk Energy.