So Tutorial Day at php[world] 2015 is over. I saw Chuck Reeves present on "Zend Framework Foundations" in the morning and Michelangelo van Dam present on "Test, Create, Secure, Repeat". Both were good, but I got the most out of Michelangelo's talk.

Chuck's presentation was just what it sounds like: a foundational introduction to Zend Framework 2 (ZF2). For those who don't know, Zend Framework was one of the original PHP code frameworks. The company I worked at used it shortly after ZF1 came out for a single (never completed) project. This was a very good introduction for me. I have a couple of side projects I've long been thinking about and I'd like to build them off of frameworks. I hadn't considered Zend Framework, but I am now. To my eyes, it seems a nice blend of magic and not magic framework-type work. That is, it's not all magical and the structure is pretty easy to work out to make the magic stuff happen.

Michelangelo's presentation was an introduction to TDD (Test Driven Development). Michelangelo knew what he was doing and was prepared with USB sticks holding the sample project we worked on. We could also pull down a repository from GitHub. Unfortunately, the range of prior knowledge in the room was quite broad, so some needed more assistance than others. This isn't a problem, per se, but since some of us were more experienced, things seemed to move slowly at times.

Interestingly, as Michelangelo's session was starting up, I had a coworker IM me asking how to run tests in our primary project. Which I have set up to be just composer test.