SymfonyCon Vienna 2024

Bugging Out in Vienna: Dagger, PIE, and the Best of SymfonyCon 2024

SymfonyCon 2024 took place in the beautiful city of Vienna, bringing together developers worldwide to share knowledge, explore new technologies, and strengthen the Symfony community. It was also a good opportunity to bring together bitExpert's PHP team from Germany and Romania, although through a series of unfortunate events, our conference veteran, Stephan Hochdoerfer was not able to join the fun.

Talks and Tech

Starting with the keynote from Fabien Potencier, I gained some insights into his work on the Twig component over the past year. It’s awesome to see that, even in the era of SPAs, server-side rendering remains relevant and powerful.

Kevin Dunglas delivered an interesting talk on HTTP compression options and their implementation in applications.

Mathias Arlaud’s session on the new JsonEncoder and ObjectMapper components was equally interesting, showcasing how these tools interact to provide a convenient way to serialize data.

An entertaining session was “From Pickles to PIE” by Andreas Braun. Andreas introduced PIE, a new PHP Installer for Extensions, and provided an entertaining overview of the evolution of PHP extension installations. While PECL has been the go-to for managing PHP extensions, PIE offers a more developer-friendly approach that fits seamlessly into modern workflows. After seeing the suggested names for the tool, I still think that "composter" would have been the best choice.

I also discovered “Dagger” for the first time, a programmable tool designed to replace traditional deployment scripts and pipelines with a modern API and cross-language scripting engine, including support for PHP. As the Dagger documentation puts it - and I can second that - developers often have to “push and pray” for successful builds. Dagger changes this by allowing local testing and near-instant feedback from delivery pipelines, significantly improving the development process.

Community Event

Another highlight of the conference was the community event at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, where we had the chance to enjoy a special exhibition about bugs. You know, because we do not have to deal with bugs enough already! Still it was a lot of fun and a nice way to connect with old and new friends.

Summing up

SymfonyCon 2024 was a nice blend of learning, innovation, and community spirit. The event not only showcased the latest features in Symfony and PHP but also gave developers a platform to connect and share experiences.

I'm already looking forward to next year’s conference in Amsterdam!