June Talks - Reading: Event Source Your Way Out Of Trouble
Details
We're excited to be back in Reading!
After skipping our Oxford event in April, it's great to return to The Thirsty Bear — PHP Berkshire's old home — who've kindly welcomed us back and generously supporting our meetup.
And yes, there’ll be FREE pizza 🍕 thanks to this month's sponsor, Meet with Tech , a new platform for events and communities launching this June.
The venue is about a 12-minute walk from Reading station. We'll be on the first floor — the stairs are next to the bar on the left as you come in.
Arrive early to grab a slice, hang out, and meet fellow developers before the talks kick off, and feel free to stay afterwards for more networking.
Drinks can be purchased individually at the upstairs bar, which will be open for us throughout the evening.
We've got two talks lined up, and the first is already live on the page.
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1️⃣ Event Source Your Way Out Of Trouble by Christopher Miller
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.
About the speaker: Christopher is a Software Engineer for MMS Marketing. He teaches people from the ground up how to be a developer. He is often found preparing his next talk, learning about the next new technology that might improve the applications, ensuring that tests are running at optimum levels or mentoring newcomers to the technology scene.
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2️⃣ TBA
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A big thank to our community sponsor Humand Talent for supporting the Oxfordshire and Berkshire PHP communities.
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Planned schedule of the evening:
- 18:30 – Arrival
- 18:45 – Talk #1
- 19:30 – Talk #2
- 20:30 – End of the event