SymfonyCon 2013

Ekino was represented at SymfonyCon in Warsaw through the presence of Thomas Rabaix, Software Architect & Sonata Project’s creator; and your obedient servant. We used this opportunity not only to enjoy marvelous Symfony talks, but also to socialize and present the work we did so far on Sonata Project (noticeably through the open sourcing of Sonata’s ecommerce library).

First of all, we’d like to thank Sensio Labs, and especially Anne Sophie Bachelard, for setting up the event. We really had a great time, and everything went smoothly. We’d also like to thank all the speakers for your work and involvement in the community. Even though we were unable to attend all the talks, we really enjoyed those we went to and were able to learn a lot.

The talks

Keynote

By Fabien Potencier

Lets start talking talks! First, we had the keynote by Fabien Potencier. After thanking the Symfony community, Fabien introduced us to a new tool named fabbot.io which will automatically parse submitted PRs on Github to detect typos and wrong coding standards and report them to the PR author. This bot is currently being tested on Symfony’s Github repositories, and may be released soon to analyze other Github repositories. Certainly something that could be useful for Sonata!

Build Awesome REST APIs With Symfony2

By William Durand & Lukas Kahwe Smith

William Durand and Lukas Kahwe Smith are well-known names in the Symfony2 ecosystem, noticeably regarding RESTful web-services building around the framework. Their active participation in bundles such as FOSRestBundle, JMSSerializer or Hateoas make them amongst the bigger references on the subject regarding the development of web services over the Symfony2 stack.

Their talk presented ways and tools to build an efficient RESTful API with Symfony2, and introduced some advanced concepts, such as HATEOAS (HTTP As The Engine Of Application State). Wanna build some? Don’t miss the talk when it’s available on SensioLabs’ Youtube Channel.

Symfony2 Content Management in 40 minutes

By David Buchmann

David granted us with a wonderful talk regarding the Symfony CMF (Content Management Framework), showing us how to build a CMS Web Application on top of Symfony2 in less than 40 minutes. The tools he built are really impressive and the code is simple and efficient. Some Sonata bundles are even integrated in the CMF bundle suite. Moreover, if you like the “hands on” talks, where you may see some code, this one is for you.

Community Building with Mentoring: What makes people crazy happy to work on an open source project?

Cathy Theys

When a Drupal Open Source community member gives a talk in a Symfony2 convention, you might expect things to be a bit weird. But not at all! Cathy gave us an enlightening talk about how to manage an open source community (of a large size) by giving us examples on how things are managed on Drupal. And there are some really good advices in there! So whether you are responsible of an open source project and want to drive your developers community, or you just want to get a sneak peek on what working in an open source community might be like, feel free to check this talk!

Moreover, Cathy helped a lot during the hackday on Sonata Project, and this was a blast!

The Karaoke

What would be a Symfony event without its traditional Karaoke night? We couldn’t avoid this event, and resist the temptation to sing a song as well. After an evening full of Guns’n’Roses, Madonna or Britney Spears, we went straight to bed, to get ready for one of our biggest days yet!

Hacking Day

Saturday was Hacking Day ; after the Karaoke, our heads weren’t that much into it, but thanks to Luis Cordova a lot of people found the motivation to attend. Sonata even had two tables working on resolving issues!

Thomas and I were present to help people discover the Sonata bundles and libraries, noticeably the new e-commerce solution, and we were able to discuss with the community and get some feedback (thank you guys!).

Want to get a touch of the SymfonyCon mood? Check out Marcin Dryka’s photos on Flickr: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/drymek/sets/72157638756944893/

Sonata Hackday table photo by Thomas Rabaix.