A few days ago, Samad informed me that the PHP Conference in Istanbul was coming up, and being a fan of these kinds of events, I quickly said yes.

The conference was held over two days by the Istanbul PHP User Group at Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ), who have proven their competence several times before. Last year, the creator of PHP himself was one of the speakers at this event.

On the big day, even though the distance between my place and the university wasn’t far, I was a little late and kept Samad waiting for a bit.

The conference started with a talk by Gary Hockin, after which it split into two parallel tracks: Peak Games and Insider. The first track was in English, and the second in Turkish. The presentation schedule was as follows:

Day 1, Peak Games Track
Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Playing "Developer"?
What's new in Xdebug?
Crafting Quality PHP Applications
Deep dive into Symfony 4 internals
Monitoring of Your PHP Applications
Introduction to PHP Extensions
Behat for characterization on tests

Day 1, Insider Track
PHP Projelerinde Test, CI ve CD Süreçleri
Insider'da ayda 5 milyar Web Push bildirimini nasıl gönderiyoruz?
Temiz Kod Tasarımı
Son Trend Konteyner Teknolojileri ve Bulut Bilişim
XSS Zafiyetinin Oluşumunu Anlamak ve Tarayıcı Güvenliği
Front-end'in 1 saniyesi

Day 2, Peak Games Track
Testing the Untestable
Zero to Jenkins: Automatic builds + deploys
PostgreSQL is not your traditional SQL database
Don't work for PHPCS, make PHPCS work for you
On Internationalization and Localization
Serve PHP Happily

Day 2, Insider Track
Future Proof Frontend Coding: Decouple your dependencies
OWASP Proactive Controls
GraphQL: Yeni Nesil Uygulama Geliştirme Arayüzleri
Google Cloud ile mükemmel PHP API'leri geliştirin
PHP ile Defansif Programlama ve Statik Analiz
Bir Veri Analistinin Web Geliştirme Maceraları

Everything was very professional and high-level. The conference hall's internet worked flawlessly, and accessing it didn’t require jumping through hoops. The university, more like a large campus, had every type of cafe and restaurant. The only minor downside was that some of the technical content, especially front-end related topics, could have been slightly better.