PHPUK 2025 Conference
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of heading down to London to attend the PHPUK 2025 Conference at The Brewery! It was the first conference I'd ever been to and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'd recommend everyone tries going to a conference at least once in their lifetime, I'm sure you will enjoy it too!
It was a very long day and by the end of it I was exhausted. I woke up at 3:50am, to make sure I was ready and then drove to the train station, I made it with about ~15 minutes to spare and I got into London just after 8am. I then took the tube to Moorgate, on the Hammersmith & City line. I probably could've been a bit smarter about my ticket as I ended up paying £15 for a day ticket, when I only actually used it twice 🙃. Once at Moorgate, it was a ~5 minute walk to The Brewery.
I got myself signed in, handed my coat over and tried to fit my swag bag I got upon arrival into my bag, which I managed eventually! I then made my way to the Keynote which was in the "Porter Tun" room, which was the biggest room of the conference. The keynote was given by Daniel North, the creator of Behaviour Driven Development, which I've heard about before, but it was fun to look back over 20 years of BDD and the history of it.
Once the Keynote was over, we all headed to our first talk of the day, I had to change rooms to the "Queen Charlotte" room where I had the pleasure of listening to Craig Francis talk about Injection Vulnerabilities and how we can protect ourselves against them. I was able to chat to Craig afterwards about PHPStan and the varying levels.
After a break, it was time to head back into the room for the next talk which was delivered by Liam Hammett and he spoke about getting the most out of API Monitoring using tools such as Grafana, Loki, Prometheus and more. This was particularly interesting because I already use some of these tools, so it was good to see other ways I can use them. At the start of this talk, I actually saw someone a few rows ahead of me who I used to work with, so it was great to catch up with him at various points throughout the day.
After another break, it was time for me to head back to Porter Tun, to listen to Nils Adermann, the Co-Creator of Composer talk about Supply Chain Security. I'm a huge fan of composer and the talk was fantastic, I deal a lot with Composer with my job and I definitely learnt a few things I can put into practice. I was able to talk to Nils after his talk to get some additional insights and information on their new product, Conductor, which I'll be joining the waiting list for.
Next up, we had lunch! The food was pretty good. I had meatballs and rice and then some rather nice lemon flavoured water! I spoke to a few people during this time to find out a bit more about them, if they'd been to a conference before, which talks they'd been to already and which ones they had planned for the afternoon. This room also had some booths set up from various sponsors of the event, so I was able to talk to them and get myself some additional swag too!
After dinner, I was back in the Queen Charlotte room, to listen to Chris Riley talk about a CI/CD pipeline called Dagger, which I'd heard of but didn't know too much about. I usually use Semaphore CI or GitHub actions for my pipelines but Dagger looks really cool. Chris is currently helping develop the PHP SDK for Dagger, so his knowledge was invaluable. I was able to catch up with Chris afterwards and we arranged a ElePHPant trade, as he has the Eddie ElePHPant from the conference last year which I was missing and I had the Oscar ElePHPant from PHP[tek] 2024 that he was missing.
There was another break to allow people to change rooms, I went back down to Porter Tun to listen to Kévin Dunglas talk about FrankenPHP, which is something else that I'd heard of but didn't really know too much about it. Given Kévin created it though, he was able to tell us all about it.
After another break it was time for the last session of the day, which was a panel discussion between some of the speakers from the day. This was in Porter Tun and lasted for ~45 minutes, there were some prizes given out and overall it was just a great atmosphere.
After the panel, we headed back downstairs for some more food and drinks. I was able to talk to a bunch of people including James Titcumb, who's currently working on PIE and who I've only really spoken to a handful of times on Twitter previously. He was telling me all about past conferences, how friendly most of the people and more!
I departed The Brewery at around 6:15pm and got the Tube back to Kings Cross, I then headed to Pizza Union with my friend Dom, who just so happened to be passing through central London on his way home. Pizza Union was rather busy (as was Nando's) so we sat outside the station and ate our Pizza. Time actually flew by here and it wasn't long before I was boarding my 9pm train back home.
By the time I got back, I was hungry again, so I stopped for a McDonalds and eventually made it in at 00:45. As I said, it was a very long day, I was very achy and tired, but it was worth it!
I cannot wait for PHPUK 2026. I had so much fun and learnt a lot. I'm looking forward to seeing the connections I made again and learning even more. I may end up going to Laravel Live UK in June, but I haven't quite decided yet.