KNP Labs at PHP T-Day

When Milan told me that they were planning to organize a conference about testing in PHP a few months ago, I was really excited about it. And in Belgrade? I mean, there are not so many conferences in Serbia at all, and having one that is only dedicated to testing PHP code would be a really brave move.

Last year in Belgrade, there was a survey which indicated that not so many developers use TDD in their day-to-day work. This was a warning light for the Serbian PHP community. They decided to do something about it and yes, thanks to the awesome PHP Serbia it happened on 22nd of November.

I was mind blown by the number of people that signed up for this event. Looks like everyone was so curious about where to start, what are the best practices, or they simply miss events in this area. Another good thing is that there were so many people from other cities.

We were all so excited because the first to hit the stage was none other than PHPUnit rock star Sebastian Begman! His talk Moving Fast Without Deploying Broken Things was about various levels of testing, end to end testing with Mink and Behat, integration testing and unit testing. The talk ended up with three important characteristics of every test: high fidelity, resilience and high precision.

Motivational talk about testing I walk in the shadow of valley of tests by Srdjan Vranac and Codeception, because tests can have frameworks too by Luka Muzinic followed. Luka showed us how easy it is to install Codeception and to get started. Then there were some typical use cases, as well as some real world examples.

In the next talk Ivan Habunek shared many useful Travis CI tips. His talk Testing open source projects with Travis CI was very interesting and informative, I was surprised how many things there were about Travis that I didn't know even though I use it every day.

We also enjoyed Narrative, API testing for a pragmatist where Ilija Studen talked about the tool that he and his colleagues created to use tests to generate the docs and to skip the boring part of writing docs.

I did two talks: Story BDD with Behat and Spec BDD with PHPSpec where I tried to cover the entire BDD flow from our point of view. Each talk consisted of theory and live coding part because "in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is". :)

Many people found the best and most useful talk of the conference to be Your code are my tests by Michelangelo van Dam. It was a story about Michelangelo’s journey to cover some existing random legacy app from Github app with tests. He gave many practical advices, I liked one that Dušan Lukić quoted "Whenever you need to var_dump, write a test" and it was actually said by a legendary programming guru Martin Fowler.

The last talk Continuous Delivery 101 by Darko Fabijan was a mixture of talking about general continuous integration concepts and presenting a tool that Darko and his colleagues created called Semaphore which is a hosted continuous integration tool.

At the end of the day speakers dinner took place in the well known Tri šešira (Three Hats) restaurant. Traditional Serbian cuisine, music and wine were everything we needed to relax after a day of talks. I had a good chance to get to know better Sebastian and Michelangelo as well as other speakers.

This conference was a huge success, and showed that the PHP community in Serbia have something to share. The organization was on a very high level, there were a live stream and free pizza and beer (they baked pizza on site!). While videos are in preparation you can listen to interview with Sebastian Bergmann and Michelangelo van Dam.

I would like to thank guys from PHP Serbia for the awesome organization and inviting me to be a part of this conference. We are looking forward for upcoming events, I know they are planning something interesting...