Merixstudio on AKAICamp #10 - how to work with Symfony2

Grzesiek, a president of the Academic Club of Internet Application, invited me to lead a workshop about Symfony2. Understanding how important it is to participate in the community gathering around the framework or programming language, I agreed without hesitation. Relatively recently I was at the same place as the participants of this event and I understand how important were people who steered me into a good direction.

On Thursday, after making the necessary corrections in my presentation and attending English lesson with charismatic Bill, I headed for the Lecture Center of University of Technology. I met with friends, waited for my turn and started my presentation.

I wanted my presentation to describe many aspects of the topic to make the audience interested in my passion.

I started with a few words about our company, described what we do and what is important to us. I also talked about our aspirations and dreams, because defining goals is an extremely important while learning about particular technology. Later I shortly presented Symfony, focusing on showing how popular it is and what are the possibilities of its modular construction. Currently, Sensio Labs (the company responsible for Symfony and technologies such as Doctrine2, Twig, Silex or Blackfire.io) provides specific components for a number of frameworks in the market, for example Drupal or Laravel.

Large group of contributors and the availability of professional materials and information is particularly important for the development of the technology.

The remainder of the presentation focused on issues such as caching in Syfmony2 in the context of Doctrine2 and its possible use for the rapid increase in productivity, which is especially important for example for start-ups. I showed some less known tricks, such as the built-in prioritization of emails, writing your own implementation mechanisms similar to ACL or something as simple and obvious as shortening commands when working with the console.

I also talked about the use of Sentry platform to collect information about errors and warnings. Without making any additional costs it allows for a better cooperation with the client and significantly faster response in case of problems with the application.

At the end of the presentation I mentioned performance issues and advised on what you should focus on and what you don’t need to overly worry about during programming with Symfony2. Promising technologies, such as PHP-PM or FastCGI, are a great opportunity for a significant acceleration of the PHP code. It’s different in the case of HHVM and PHP 7.0, where this increase usually reaches up only to several tens of percent.

I was really happy to share my knowledge and infecting people with my passion. I hope that the audience could see how I like what I do and that it motivated them to focus on self-development in the field of modern web development.

Ii think that AKAICamp events are a great initiative. If only I receive further invitations, I will gladly prepare my next presentation, which might help to increase interest in web-based technologies and PHP programming.