SymfonyCon Disneyland Paris 2022
1300 Attendees talking about Symfony receiving a bunch of socks. Oh, and did we mention it took place in Disneyland?
With 1300 attendees this was my first really big conference. For that, the SymfonyCon 2022 prepared 3 conference tracks, 38 talks, 1 unconference room, and an exhibition area with a lot of partners giving away a lot of socks this year. The whole conference was in English and in general the quality of the talks was pretty high. Fortunately, I did not have to go alone and my colleague Holger Dörner participated as well.
Some of our highlights:
Day one
Keynote - Fabien Potencier
During the Keynote, Fabien not only revealed what's going to be the 200th Symfony component (webhook component) but also the 201st (RemoteEvent component). It was also very interesting to get some insights into decision-making and how new ideas develop into actual components over time.
7 Lessons You Can Learn From Disney Movies - Stefan Koopmanschap
A nice talk about trust in our own skills, teamwork and other lessons we can take from Disney Movies to our daily life as developers. It was a refreshing change to the tech talks and also the slides had a wonderful Disney-inspired design. I love talks based around a matching theme and this was an excellent example of how to do just that.
FrankenPHP: a modern application server for Symfony apps - Kévin Dunglas
During this talk Kévin explained why he started the FrankenPHP project, how it works under the hood and what advantages it has to other webservers. He also explained the differences between popular SAPIs like PHP-FPM and their own one specially developed for Go web servers. Even though he clearly stated that it should not yet be used in production I thought it has a lot of potential to simplify the development and deployment process of PHP applications.
Day two
How to Instantly Upgrade your Legacy Symfony in Minutes - Tomas Votruba
Tomas Votruba is the creator of rector and spoke exactly about that tool. As he asked how many people were still maintaining Symfony 1 or 2 projects actually quite a lot of participants raised their hands. And he did a great job (including a live demo!) explaining how to upgrade such old applications step by step. I think it is still debatable how many (thousands of) minutes it will take to upgrade them but rector really makes your life easier.
The Evolution of Symfony: Now and to the Future! - Ryan Weaver
Alongside the great talk about the history and future of Symfony Ryan performed three costume changes on stage. He went from Mickey Mouse to The Mandalorian to Grogu (Baby Yoda) and all the slides as well as the topics matched the costumes perfectly. It was a great closing talk to a great conference!
After the first day, the Walt Disney Studios Park was open for SymfonyCon attendees only! So obviously we had a lot of fun riding roller-coasters without bothering to wait in line for 30 minutes or longer. That was really a blast. One of my favorite coasters was actually "Ratatouille: The Adventure". Not because it was very fast or nerve-wracking, but it did a great job of pulling you into the Disney World and making you feel like you are actually experiencing a part of the movie yourself.
To sum it up we had tons of fun during the SymfonyCon 2022 Disneyland Paris. The conference talks were very informative and well presented but there were still more than enough opportunities to meet new people, partners, and Disney Mascots. The next SymfonyCon will take place in Brussels, we are already looking forward to that!