Making an application scale and go faster is often seen as a wizardly task. We read the micro-optimisation tricks posted in tech blogs and apply them with unconditional trust and great hope, and then wonder why performances haven't improved that much (Wait, I even replaced print with echo!!!).In this talk well see how we can take easy, practical steps we can apply over and over that really make a difference, by analysing what our application does under the hood, measuring how and where the different resources are used, eliminating the real bottlenecks and restructuring critical components to handle growing loads.

You can follow along with a copy of his slides. There's also other great recordings from this year's event - check out the home page for the event for more.

A quick romp though installing a full php development tool chain. Starting at A for Apache and ending at X for X-debug including U for unit testing and S for source control.

You can watch the video and check out the source he uses in the talk. For more great sessions, check out the latest news on the PHPNW site.

We've all read the textbooks and are using version control systems for our code, but our databases are left out in the cold. Every team has their own workaround, ranging from patch files to SQL snippets in the bugtracker, but none is really robust. There isn't a silver bullet solution, but this talk will show you different approaches and solutions that you can use in different kinds of projects, helping you to handle the changes in your database structure in a more sophisticated way.

You can find the related slides here. There's also other great episodes on the PHP North West website.

• John Mertic's Deployable applications slides
• Lorna Mitchell's Teach a Man to Fish
• Lorenzo Alberton's slides
• Stuart Herbert's posts on Jeremy Coates, the Saturday speakers, track 1, Friday social, the audience
• Jamie Hurst's wrapup

As others pop up, they'll be added to the list. Don't see yours here? let me know!

The wonderful PHP Northwest 2010 conference took place last weekend in Manchester, UK, and our Marco Tabini was present to keynote Lorna Jane Mitchell's keynote "Teach a man to fish." Here's the transcript from the event (powered by Blue Parabola's upcoming live-blogging system Broadr).

You can also find more about the session on it's Joind.in page (including a link to her slides.

As in previous years, we'll first of all deal with selecting the papers for our main conference day, 9th October. Talks can be 60 minutes or 30 minutes, can be on any subject if you can persuade us it's relevant to PHP developers, and speakers anywhere on the spectrum from expert to newbie are welcome.

The deadline to get them in is July 10th, so if you're going to submit, you'd better do it quickly! The event will be happening in Manchester October 9th and will include a full day of speakers and presentations. Speakers will receive an invite to the speaker's dinner, a conference pass and accommodations for the evening of Friday night to Saturday morning.

You can find out complete details on the conference from its main website - including registration if you just wish to attend.