Event recap

One of the great events of each year us at Upsun get to participate in is SymfonyCon. It’s a chance, like all events, to meet directly with developers to reconnect, share ideas, and to get updates on what people are working on and interested in. Additional this year the Upsun, Platform.sh, and Blackfire teams brought nine talks to SymonfyCon to our own track – covering topics from documentation, CLI design, QA, cloud application platforms, AI, microservices, and more.

Check out each of those talks in the links below, or view the full playlist on YouTube.

Creating hybrid PHP-Go CLIs with Symfony console

Creating hybrid PHP-Go CLIs with Symfony console with Antonis Kalipetis

Discover how to bridge the gap between legacy PHP code and the performance of Go in hybrid CLI development. Using the Symfony Console library, you’ll see how we blend these two languages in the Upsun CLI, embedding the Legacy Platform.sh PHP CLI within Go for seamless functionality.

This approach not only enhances performance but also preserves backward compatibility, saving time while migrating from the older PHP-based CLI to the new, faster Go implementation. You’ll learn how we maintain intuitive command routing, make it invisible to users, and tackle authentication across both platforms.

This talk is perfect for those looking to modernize their tools without starting from scratch.

ML inference in PHP by example: leverage ONNX and Transformers on Symfony

ML inference in PHP by example: leverage ONNX and Transformers on Symfony with Guillaume Moigneu

Whether you’re an AI enthusiast or a developer curious about machine learning, this session will equip you with the knowledge to implement ML inference in your Symfony applications.

This talk will show by example how to implement ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) and Transformer models to bring advanced AI capabilities to your Symfony projects.

Building a fraud prevention component using Symfony

Building a fraud prevention component using Symfony with Moritz Schuh

Online fraud and abuse poses a serious risk to all digital businesses and having preventive measure in place has become indispensable.

In this talk we will be looking at how to build a Symfony application tasked with detecting and preventing malicious activities such as credit card fraud, automated registrations and abuse of free resources.

Our application will collect data from different sources and provide a RESTFul API to other services to guide access to resources, trigger verification requests and block suspicious activities.

An unholy bond: harmonizing dev and marketing

An unholy bond: harmonizing dev and marketing with Celeste van der Watt

Connecting the broken dots between the dev team and the marketing team to create an unholy synergy. Giving a simple guide to help marketing and development teams work better and more effectively as a team to create better products, messaging, and user experiences. Highlight collaboration practices, tools and real-world experiences to ensure both teams are aligned and achieve success.

Break things fast: accelerated QA and testing

Break things fast: accelerated QA and testing with Greg Qualls

In the fast-paced world of development, the ability to test and iterate quickly is paramount. This talk explores how Upsun empowers developers to “break things fast” by providing full-stack preview environments that can be spun up on demand, mirroring production settings without the risks associated with traditional cloning methods. Learn how to leverage these transient environments for rapid QA, experimentation, profiling, load testing, and debugging.

Upsun is a cloud application platform that empowers developers to build, deploy, and manage applications with greater flexibility and efficiency. It offers advanced resource and container management, allowing teams to dynamically allocate computing resources and customize container configurations to meet the specific needs of their applications.

Platforms and frameworks eat culture for breakfast

Platforms and frameworks eat culture for breakfast with Nigel Kersten

As tech leaders we like to think we’re responsible for driving organisational and cultural change, but in most cases, we’re just catching up to the possibilities created by new kinds of software, and re-forming our engineering organisations to take advantage of them.

Organisational dynamics are critical, but success at enabling fast flow is ultimately dependent upon how well your tech stack enables it. It’s technology that drives progress.

In this talk Nigel will take a tour through some history of the DevOps movement, findings from a decade of State of DevOps Reports, his experience driving change at large and small companies, discuss some relevant inflection points in software and how they influence organisational dynamics, argue that the dominance of “culture” topics divorced from technological progress fails to advance our industry, and demonstrate how platform and framework adoption drives the best kind of cultural changes.

Bulletproofing for Black Friday

Bulletproofing for Black Friday with Thomas di Luccio

The holiday season, especially Black Friday, is a goldmine for e-commerce apps—but only if they can handle the traffic. When the surge hits, unprepared applications buckle under pressure, leading to frustrated users and crashed servers. Been there, done that…

In this talk, I’ll share some e-commerce horror stories from the trenches and show you how to avoid becoming one. We’ll dive into a proven roadmap to reliability using production cloning, traffic generation, and real-time observability.

With these strategies (plus a dash of your magic), you’ll have the perfect recipe to ensure your app withstands the holiday rush—and you can relax, knowing your system won’t let you down.

Crafting a microservice that fits your needs

Crafting a microservice that fits your needs with Haylee Millar

Microservices offer substantial benefits in terms of scalability and flexibility. However, these advantages come with challenges, including increased complexity and the potential for service fragmentation. In this talk, we’ll delve into a real-life case study demonstrating how adopting a microservice was the ideal solution for expanding functionality within an existing system. Through this example, we will explore the decision-making process, the implementation strategy, and the ultimate impact on system performance and flexibility.

The role of empathy in technical writing

The role of empathy in technical writing with Kemi Elizabeth Ojogbede

It’s easy to assume that our users are experts when writing documentation. But technical writing without diagrams, code examples, videos, screenshots and more can ostracise a large chunk of users who are simply searching for help when using your product. When writing technical documentation, empathy allows us to imagine ourselves as the reader: a junior developer who just started on the job, a sales manager who needs more information for a client deck, a member of the customer success team helping a client on a video call. When we’re able to understand that our docs form the foundation of knowledge for a wide range of users, we’re able to write in a manner that positively impacts all. We may be writing about logical concepts, but our approach can definitely benefit from a bit of heart. This talk will break down the vital role empathy plays in the process of writing technical documentation for users from all business backgrounds.