Vonage at PHPDay Verona, 2025

I get particularly excited when I speak at a new conference in a country that I have not spoken in before, so this year, it was PHPDay Verona that got me itching to travel. One of the things that I love about the PHP community is that when I speak at such events, I have a completely new audience and local community that I have never met before, and the opportunity to talk to new developers, while usually knowing half the lineup of other speakers.

Tech meets history: the Piazza Delle ErbeWe’ll skip the fact that the location, Verona in Northern Italy, is absolutely stunning, as I have plenty to write about on the other talks, given by speakers that you can catch at other events throughout the year. It always blows my mind that you can watch these people on stage and then just casually chat with them afterwards.. But it’s worth remembering: that kind of access is only possible thanks to the support of conference sponsors. To support Italy’s PHP, Laravel, Symfony, React, Vue, Ruby, and countless other conferences they run, check out GrUSP, which did such an excellent job of PHPDay. Let’s dig into some key talks given during the Conference:

Roman Pronsky on The PHP Foundation

Our keynote started off aptly on PHP’s 30th Birthday. It’s certainly a testament to resilience when you consider how much PHP has evolved for the better. I wrote briefly on the Foundation in this blog post from last year. For those unfamiliar with Roman, he’s a Developer Advocate at JetBrains and also one of the founders of The PHP Foundation. Since its inception three years ago, it has been truly remarkable to watch the foundation not only secure the funding and talent needed to deliver faster improvements to the language, but also to witness the entire process unfold with full transparency..

Nothing comes free, and I have written many times about the difficult state of Open Source and Open Source Community, where it is hard to get funding from multi-million dollar businesses whose entire livelihoods and existence depend on the PHP Project. It’s also, sadly, entirely their right to do so. I’d highly recommend showing that blog post to your managers or your directors.

In three years, a lot has happened. They’ve raised a team, money, and governance from scratch, with financial support from most major platforms and frameworks. A new extension dependency manager is in the works from James Titcumb. I mean, at lunch, Gina Peter Banyard actually showed me a test implementation of generics working in PHP. That blew my mind, considering how much debate there’s been around what a solid implementation of C would even look like.

There is still a lot to do, but one thing that hasn’t been shouted out enough is a donation of €205,000 from the German Government in the form of the Sovereign Tech Agency. Anyone who says nobody uses PHP anymore simply isn’t paying attention or isn’t informed enough.

Florian Engelhardt on The One Billion Row Challenge in PHP

It’s easy (and admittedly a bit anecdotal) to point to the number of times peers have told me that PHP is a slow language. The fact of the matter is, actually, it’s not. Of course, some of that depends on what you are trying to do, what your vertical hardware resources are like, and how much scaling and parallel processing you need.

I’d only heard of the concept of the one billion row challenge before, so it was fascinating to see Florian not only explain the simple-yet-challenging concept of it, but also see PHP start to tackle it.

The One Billion Row challenge involves taking (no surprises here) one billion rows of set data and benchmarking the processing time to loop through an imaginary ETL process. There was an imaginative bit of detective work here, as Florian starts off with fgetcsv (coming in at an acceptable 25 mins of runtime, and probably my first port of call) and from there, works through the call stack one line at a time. There’s some unexpected tinkering to be done. And while it is a challenge rather than a real-world scenario, I’ve got to say that getting it down to 12.76 seconds is quite a feat!

Laura Durieux on Generative AI into API Platform

It’s no surprise that Laura mentioned other developers groaned when she told them she was giving a talk on AI. Like any emerging technology, AI has both its pros and cons. Unfortunately, the media often highlights the worst aspects, which understandably makes developers more cynical.

How about a positive impact, instead? That was Laura’s gambit, and a fantastic initiative behind the scenes to remind the current tech scene that diversity is something we have struggled with, but not always. My first ever tech talk contained an introduction to the pioneers of programming, and it was a tough first talk (If you’re thinking about speaking on tech, I’d advise not taking my path and choosing a supposedly spicy topic), which contained an introduction to the pioneers of programming. This is wholly relevant to Laura’s initiative, named IMPACT, which aims to highlight the achievements made by women in the tech space. The AI and API Platform part is the neat part.

Laura stitched together queries to bring back biographies from AI providers for the women featured on the site. Those responses are consumed by an ORM (in this case, Doctrine) to create entities. In turn, this data is exposed via the API Platform framework for CRUD actions. As with most discussions around AI these days, this one opened up a can of worms, particularly around the ethics of doing something that, on the surface, seems fairly simple. Take those AI-generated biographies, for example. They were likely trained on content scraped from Wikipedia. But that raises the question: who actually owns the copyright to that text?

The more discussions from software engineers on this topic, the better. I’m looking forward to seeing what Laura speaks on next at the API Platform Conference in Lille later this year, which Vonage will also be at.

Gina Peter Banyard Does “JS lol wat” for PHP

If you’re not aware of “JS Wat”, you’re in for a treat. A 20-minute deep dive into what happens when you really put a programming language to the test to check its consistency. It’s a talk that was given at dotJS 2012, and is just as relevant today.

But, how about PHP? Is there anyone more qualified right now than Gina Banyard, working on the core language, to show off some really wacky behaviour to spike your curiosity?

There are too many examples to go through here, but I particularly enjoyed a couple of specific examples: 

I’m pretty sure I’ve come across this before, but specific implementations of objects actually override the boolean cast. Therefore, $variable = new stdClass() evaluates to true, BUT $variable = simplexml_load_string(‘<root/>’) is …somehow false?

A second particularly bizarre example is trying to increment on false. If you attempt to iterate on it using the $variable++, then you get, as expected, an exception. However, if you try to iterate it with an integer, i.e. $variable += 1, it, erm, actually comes back a (int)1. The key thing to take away from all these strange behaviours is that they’re all known and are being fixed.

Zuzana Kunckova on Larabelles and Underestimated Representation

The latest PHP survey response gave a shocking statistic: 91% of respondents were male. Laravel was even higher, at 96%. When I gave one of my first talks very early in my speaking career, I actually spoke on this subject briefly, and I got a fairly unpleasant reaction. Several times, audience members came up to me and casually stated that “men are just better at tech”, and it absolutely blows my mind that educated people still genuinely believe this (especially since the start of my talk identified early pioneers in programming such as Kathleen Booth, Grace Hopper, Margret Hamilton and Mary Keller, the latter featured in this talk as well).

Zuzana pointed out that, clearly, we just need to do better. There is the correct conclusion here that we need to represent people better to get a more diverse talent pool. Everyone can do their bit - I mean, personally, I have to correct people who attempt to and want the status quo to remain. It is this need for better representation that led to Zuzana creating the Larabelles community, which I proudly mentor at. The more exposure this initiative gets, the stronger and more inclusive our tech community becomes.

Me, on Writing CLIs

The inspiration for my talk came from the fact that Chuck Reeves rewrote the Vonage CLI from the ground up with TypeScript. What was apparent when you have a greenfield site like this is that it is very easy to sleepwalk into traps of tech debt very early on. So, we wrote this talk to look at CLI design, which enabled me to somewhat scar my audience with some really grim decisions made in CLIs we have very likely touched at some point in our careers (curl -X) anyone? If you’re interested, I’ll be pitching this talk to other conferences in the coming year, so keep your eye out. If you do catch me, you can join a growing group of developers who own Alex, the Vonage elephant.