Three months ago the two of us, Dusan Lukic and Milan Popovic, came up with an idea to visit TrueNorthPHP, one of the most famous php conferences, happening in Toronto, Canada. Since we heard some really good stuff about the conference it didn't take us long to decide.
After finishing all the necessary stuff regarding getting a visa we started a 15 hour journey towards Toronto - a 2 hour flight to Amsterdam and an 8 hour flight to Toronto.
The Ontario part of Canada is beautiful - we found that out on our first day as we visited Niagara Falls, a place where probably the most famous Serbian scientist in history Nikola Tesla designed the first hydro-electric power plant that changed the world in 1895.
The view was just breathtaking...
The conference took part in Microsoft Canada Conference Centre in Toronto which is a very convenient venue.
The first day was reserved for workshops, we attended the “PHP Extensions Tutorial” by Elizabeth Smith that was an awesome introduction to a lower level C programming that is used for building php extensions.
Beau Simensen's "CQRS and Event Sourcing" workshop was amazing and very informative. We have heard that the other two workshops were awesome as well.
The conference started tomorrow with keynote from Marco Tabini who is the founder of the popular magazine “PHP Architect”. During his talk he dispelled some of the common myths that surround the programming community.
Then the talks started. All the talks were of a very good quality and covered very interesting topics. Adam Wathan had a nice talk on how you can avoid foreach loops with Laravel’s collections and people that wanted to know more about UUIDs had a great talk from Ben Ramsey. Jeff Kolesnikowicz showed us how we can use websockets in PHP applications. He gave us very good introduction followed by examples. Josh Butts, the VP of Engineering at Offers.com, taught us about Just-In-Time Software Manufacturing. We really enjoyed in this talk while Josh presented us his great experience about using Kanban as methodology in software development. Audience had a chance to learn how Kanban is different from Waterflow and Scrum. Probably the best talk of the day for us was “Domain driven deconstructed” by Andrew Cassel which was an awesome introduction to DDD concept that is getting more and more popular in PHP community.
Between these two days there was a hackathon organized which unfortunately we didn't attend.
The second day kicked off with the well know PHP Jeopardy session that is hosted by Jeremy Mikola. Some great talks followed and some of them were Keeping Eloquent Eloquent that was very useful to all the Laravel people and Mutation Testing Humbug where Marc Antoine Aube presented this very interesting concept. Beau Simensen spoke had an interesting talk - "Learn to Stop Wiring and Love Laravel's Container". This was not only Laravel talk - it was an extensive talk about speakers journey in using dependency injection. He spoke about his beginnings, how he started writing his own DI container and later decided to join the Symfony team. We found out much about Laravel container, why it is good and how to use to use it.
Unfortunately this was the last TrueNorthPHP conference. Chris and Peter gave everyone a great example of how to organize a conference which is an unforgettable experience for us.
We took a day to do some sightseeing in Toronto while we were there. CN Tower is breathtaking and we also visited Steam Whistle Brewery which is a local craft brewery.
After that we headed to WurstCon which is another evidence that a great conference can be held anywhere. We gathered over a sausage and beer to talk about stuff that we like. Anybody who has ever visited WurstCon has the right to organize one, so we have already talked about doing the same in Leskovac with help from our friends from Bulgaria PHP.
This trip was amazing for us as we visited a great conference in the part of the world where we have never been before. After this we are sure that whatever Chris and Peter choose to organize next - we’ll be there!
