Codeigniter Conference 2012 – Post Conference Thoughts
Having not even got back home yet after the 2012 Codeigniter Conference I thought I’d write up some of my highlights of a very enjoyable weekend:
Testing - John Crepizzi
Testing is something I’ve been working on recently using Simpletest, Jenkins and Codeigniter with moderate success, it was great to see that PHPUnit can be used quite simply, however as full PHPUnit support is planned to be integrated into the core of Codeigniter in v3.0 I think I’ll wait before transitioning away from Simpletest.
API Driven Development – Nick Jackson
Nick did a great job of reassuring me I’m doing things right. I’ve just started a project where I’m essentially building the API first as I know there are going to be multiple apps on top of it. I’ll definitely be refining my existing API based on some of the tips given regarding response format.
MongoDB – Alex Bilbie
MongoDB is something I’ve played with but not used in anger yet, I’m not sure I have a use case for it yet but this talk did demonstrate some very cool edge case functions for searching using latitude and longitude where MongoDB will do all the heavy lifting when trying to do box searches on a 3d spherical earth model.
Who needs Ruby when you’ve got CodeIgniter? – Jamie Rumbelow
Jamie Rumberlow’s talk was very practical and showed some very good ideas of how Codeigniter could be improved but demonstrated some really hacky ways to make it work the way he wanted (putting non POST data for validation into $_POST anyone….). Really I’d have preferred to see him talk about how the framework could be improved to fit in with the best practice. That’s the kind of thing that gives Codeigniter a bad reputation amongst many PHP developers.
Live coding - Phil Sturgeon
Phil demoed setting up a pyrocms site on pagodabox, while I didn’t find the actual demo very relevant to me, I do like is looking into others coding setups, this lead me to spend half of the next talk configuring my bash prompt and colour scheme to show mercurial or git branch names!
Other Talks
All of the talks were very engaging but some not as interesting to me personally, in particular Harro Verton was a great speaker on ORMs but it just further confirmed my views that I’m not a fan.
General Thoughts
Generally the conference went well, the venue was pretty good (apart from the food) and the wifi nothing short of amazing. Oh and the best bit – a FREE t shirt!
I’m always in a bit of a love hate relationship with Codeigniter, it’s very quick and easy but its slightly old fashioned way of doing things and lack of modern features like auto-loading, namespacing and dependency injection make it annoy me and cause me to look at things like Symfony2 or Silex.
Still a great weekend away and thanks to all who were responsible for the planning and organisation. I’ll hopefully be back next time.
Tags: ciconf, codeigniter, Internet, PHP, Programming
Nice summary of the speakers and every one gets what they want out of conferences, seems like you enjoyed it. Personally I enjoyed it a lot and was very pleased with all speakers, a lot of them inspired me to make some changes or improve my workflow and common practices. API’s and eat your own dog food + MongoDB are two things I started and dropped for a big personal project so going to go back to the project asap and recode things in what I think will be a lot better.
My main point I wanted to make was that your comment on frameworks is something you hear a lot and to be fair its a fair point on the way CI works and lacks a few features that you know would be nice but why should CI change dramatically when it has its place. There is a place for CI and then there is the others which have their place and I think a good coder understands that and knows when to use the right one. Personally I also love Fuel so when I need the features that CI does not offer or offers in a hacked way, or when its just not capable, or the best fit, I just look else where. I think its the best way to look at frameworks as lets face it, with the choice we are spoilt and its easy to get “diva” like when we don’t have two white rabbits in our dressing room, ice tea at exactly 16.5c in a cup made of gold.
Well thats my two pence on the subject, will be good to see you next time and nice write up
Thanks for your comments, sounds like we enjoyed similar talks.
I don’t want to debate frameworks but you’re right, CI works for some things, for other things other frameworks work better and we then have the responsibility to choose the right one.
Yeh, framework wars are far from fun and always end badly. But sounds like you have the same thinking any how which is refreshing.
Look forward to meeting up again!
Hey,
Glad to hear you enjoyed the conference.
Thanks for attending and your kind words,
Alex