Written by Richard Keen, Lead Backend Developer
Every year, some of the backend development team head off to PHP UK Conference at The Brewery in London. With over 300 sponsors, speakers, and delegates, the conference is all about the latest tips, tricks, and technologies relating to PHP programming. We asked some of the team what their key takeaways were; here’s what they had to say, as well as some behind-the-scenes photos!
Our first takeaway is from Wim Godden from Cu.be Solutions. His talk covered Ansible, an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies tasks like system configuration, software deployment and workflow orchestration. Ansible is written in Python and uses a human-readable language, so it’s great to work with.
Wim gave us an insight into how his company uses Ansible to deploy code to hundreds of different Linux-based machines all over the globe, all with varying states of network connectivity. It was interesting to learn how flexible Ansible is for use cases like this, and a really unique take on code deployment.
Our next takeaway is from Katy Ereira from Personio. Her talk titled ‘Shrek, Onions and Architecture’ was a great analogy and a good listen, especially when it came to ‘hexagonal architecture’, a software design pattern that aims to create a flexible, maintainable, and loosely coupled system. She also highlighted some useful tips for working with legacy and monolith codebases and how to refactor and organise them to modernise and reduce complexity.
We often have clients come to us with complex, dated codebases, so this is something we can’t wait to try out, and we think the benefits for our clients will be great.
Our third takeaway was from Lorna Mitchell, a technology leader and developer experience expert from Yorkshire. She gave an in-depth talk about the latest developments in the OpenAPI Spec, which we’ve recently been using to document some APIs we’ve been working on.
OpenAPI Spec can be used for so much more, like documenting 3rd party APIs, while giving you the ability to overlay changes on top of new revisions. Or, you can use software like Microcks to run a mock server based off an OpenAPI Spec to rate your spec out of five. This is also really useful for allowing frontend and backend teams to work simultaneously, improving efficiency across the board.
Our final takeaway was from Nils Adermann, co-creator of a powerful tool we use called Composer. He gave an interesting talk about supply chain security, where he emphasised the importance of not only making our own code secure, but also the third-party code your own code depends on. Securing our own code is the first step, but many people forget about securing third-party code, so hackers often target this code first.
Composer manages the metadata of the third-party code used in projects, but pulls the code from the source, like GitHub, where there are lots of ways malicious attackers can control the code, such as GitHub Repo hijacking.
Nils goes on to talk about how a lot of these issues can be mitigated and minimised by using tools like Private Packagist in order to secure your own version of both the code and metadata, giving you total control of your security.
It looks like it’s going to be a good year ahead for PHP, and we can’t wait to bring some of these exciting new features to our client projects in the future to make their websites more secure, streamlined and reliable.
We’re already looking forward to PHP UK Conference 2026!
Have a read of some of our other articles
We’ve been thinking about what the year ahead will hold for the world of digital. From UI design through to virtual reality, here's everything we think is going to take off this year.
As the WordPress drama rolls on, we’ve been thinking about what the best alternatives are for our clients. We’re massive advocates of Payload, but what are the other options?
