Wednesday November 15th 2017

Timings

  • 18:30 – Turn up, have a drink, a snack, and a chat (pizza, beer, coffee)
  • 19:00 – Getting Started with Xdebug - Liam Bowers
  • 19:30 – Mid session interval
  • 19:35 – Nuclear Powered Software Security - Chris Riley
  • 20:30ish – Pop over to the Headrow House pub for a drink and a chat

Free tickets are available on Meetup. Please sign up so we know how much pizza to buy.

The event is at Futurelabs. The door to get in is shown here.

There will be some bottles of beer, coffee, and pizza provided. This is a free event.

The Talks

Getting Started with Xdebug

Liam Bowers @liam_bowers

Xdebug is an extension for PHP to assist with debugging and development. It contains a single step debugger to use with IDEs; it upgrades PHP’s var_dump() function; it adds stack traces for Notices, Warnings, Errors and Exceptions; it features functionality for recordig every function call and variable assignment to disk; it contains a profiler; and it provides code coverage functionality for use with PHPUnit.

https://xdebug.org/ is an essential tool for PHP development. Liam will show us how to get it up and running.

Liam’s on twitter: @liam_bowers.

Nuclear Powered Software Security

Chris Riley @giveupalready

It seems to be almost a weekly occurrence that another company makes the news headlines for being hacked and in the process disclosing sensitive user data and company secrets. These security meltdowns can cause catastrophic effects to the company in lost user trust and huge costs putting things right.

A nuclear power plant is considered one of the most dangerous things mankind has built, yet they very rarely go wrong. The systems engineering that goes into making nuclear power plants safe is a fascinating topic to study but on the surface it seems entirely irrelevant to PHP developers.

In this talk I’m going to show you how this level of safety is achieved, what happens when it goes wrong and then see what lessons we, as PHP developers, can learn from it to help us secure our applications from meltdown.

Chris is on twitter: @giveupalready.

Sponsors

Our sponsors make this monthly event possible, so please take the time to check them out, and thank them for their support.

  • Futurelabs – Are a not-for-profit formed to help provide a focal point for tech start-up and scale-up businesses in and around Leeds. Futurelabs offer hot desking, fixed desk space or larger office spaces for tech businesses at very reasonable prices. @LeedsFuturelabs

  • Sky Betting & Gaming – A tech company born out of Sky, and are aiming to be the UK’s best digital business. 1000+ colleagues, developing some of the country’s biggest brands in online betting and gaming. Their careers page provides great detail as to the working environment and range of work available across the technology stack. @skybetcareers

  • Infinity Works – Infinity Works offer an unparalleled skillset across a broad range of engineering disciplines and business specialisms, making them capable of helping to deliver any project and overcome any challenge. Some areas of work are project & product delivery, Managed Services, Organisational Optimisation, Consulting, and Training. They also offer great careers for leading Engineers and Technologists. @InfinityWorks

Free tickets are available on Meetup. Please sign up so we know how much pizza to buy.