Spyder Trap developers Travis Manick, myself and Khoa Nguyen

Given that I am a primarily back-end developer I selected topics that I felt would enhance my capacity in that role.

In this article I will talk about my three favorite development sessions, providing some information about each and explaining why I felt they were really top notch.

Session Review: It’s Not Just About The Code

The first session I am going to talk about was the sleeper hit of the conference in my opinion.  The title of the talk was “Beyond PHP: it’s not (just) about the code” and it was given by the brilliant Wim Godden.  I wasn’t totally sure what to expect from this session but I was very pleasantly surprised by the subject matter.

Wim put together slides based on actual work he has done for clients (anonymized of course) and walked us through what the problem was and ultimately what the solution was that his company implemented.

We learned about a wide variety of things including database optimization, network topography, code optimization and even some server-level monitoring we can do as developers to ensure that our applications are running as well as they possibly can be.

His examples were really specific and he engaged the audience by asking people to contribute to the discussion and offer their ideas for how to solve the problems he was describing.  This approach worked really well and kept everybody on the edge of their seats.

Session Review: Building an Identity Extraction Engine in PHP

One of the talks that I was most excited to attend was “Building an Identity Extraction Engine in PHP”, primarily because the speaker (Jonathan LeBlanc) is someone I have engaged with quite heavily on Twitter for over 3 years.

It was extremely fun to walk into the session and have Jonathan instantly drop what he was doing to walk up and shake my hand.  We spoke for quite a bit about what we had been up to recently and how things were going in our professional lives; it was like catching up with an old friend.  Those people who say that you can’t create meaningful interactions / relationships online are just plain wrong.

At-any-rate, this talk did not disappoint!  Jonathan was an extremely talented speaker who not only brought a ton of knowledge to the table but also a tremendous amount of passion and energy.  I found his talk to be absolutely fascinating and I have already grabbed the source code he presented and started modifying it to extend some of the existing functionality.

Engaging talks with tangible takeaways like this are the reason why these types of conferences are so darn cool.

Session Review: Building Testable PHP Applications

The last session I attended was on Building Testable PHP Applications by Chris Hartjes (aka grumpy programmer) who is nothing short of an Internet celebrity.  He’s an international speaker and someone I have looked at for a long time as being the authority in TDD (test driven development).

This session was the most intense in terms of how he delivered his content and how deep the subject matter went.  At the end of his talk he mentioned that his second book was being released the next day.  I learned so much from this talk that I immediately purchased a copy of the book (The Grumpy Programmer’s PHPUnit Cookbook) when it became available and plan on reading it as quickly as possible.

Test driven development is something I strongly believe in and the more that we as developers follow that approach, the less we will have to worry about things breaking or having to stay late during deployments.

Outside of the sessions it was great to connect with other developers, talk about current projects, technologies, triumphs, etc, and get a feel for what others in the industry are doing.  The venue (U of M continuing education center) was excellent and I can say with certainty that the attendees all had a very good experience.

Spyder Trap’s other developers that attended, Khoa Nguyen and Travis Manick, both focused more on the front-end development talks.  Khoa and Travis agreed that the session on “Rocking Responsive Web Development” by Josh Broton was their favorite.

Great Networking

By the end of the weekend I had made several new friends, talked face-to-face with people that I had previously only engaged with on Twitter, taken over 15 typed pages of notes and had many new techniques that I could take back to work and immediately start implementing.

The quality of the talks were really top notch and it honestly wasn’t until I talked with the conference organizer, Jonathan Sundquist, that I realized this was the first year of this conference.  Everything ran really smoothly and I look forward to attending next year with the possibility of also being a presenter.

• Conference: http://midwestphp.com/
• Additional Info: https://joind.in/event/view/1090
• My comments on sessions: https://joind.in/user/view/20989

Development Challenge

Mike had other ideas for our afternoon though and asked us if we would be interested in doing a 90 minute development challenge.   We would break into teams of two, receive a random topic that he came up with and then have a short amount of time to build an application and/or website that relates to that topic.  I was extremely excited about this idea and quickly volunteered to take on the role of a team leader.  Khoa Nguyen was paired with me and we received our category.

It wasn’t hard to come up with a few ideas for our topic and we got really excited for 3:30pm to hit and start building out our idea.

The topic we ended up with was “Spyder Trap” which is fairly general but it gave us a great opportunity to do something creative.  Since were in the midst of a huge office move we decided to make that our primary focus.

Our Code Creation

During the week prior we had all been using a variety of hash tags on Twitter including #GoodByeEatStreet, #HelloLoringCorners, and #SpyderOOODay so we decided to make use of those and build a website that pulled in data from Twitter, arranged it in a very attractive way, then allowed people to filter by hash tag so that they could see what people were tweeting about in relation to those topics.

Being a primarily back-end developer I took on the task of pulling in the JSON data from Twitter, parsing it out and getting it into the structure that was needed for Isotope which is a very cool jQuery plug-in that we have been using quite a bit lately.  While I was working on that Khoa built the front-end JavaScript and CSS that would enable us to take the data that I was generating and display things the way we wanted to.

I made use of Twitter’s media entities so that any photos or videos that were included with the tweets would be visible on our site to give users a more rich and exciting experience.  90 minutes goes very quickly when you are heads-down coding but we were able to get the site fully functional including adding a new v-host on our development server.

A Great Team Experience

We used a Google hangout so that people could watch and judge remotely which added a really neat layer to the whole experience.  Mike had contacted a friend of his who works for Best Buy Corporate and he was so intrigued by the idea that he agreed to come in and be one of the judges, along with Mike and Spyder Trap VP Aaron Weiche (and one of his daughters).

Developing under pressure is a lot of fun and really forces you to come up with a solid plan and stick to it.  All of the teams put together some really cool ideas and it was fun to see their creations during the judging.

Beyond just the technical side of things, this was a great team building exercise and I think that it was a fun opportunity to showcase what us Spyder Trap developers can do. I look forward to the next time we get the chance to do some competitive team-based coding, it was a blast!