The organizers of the Laracon conferences have just announced the latest addition to the conference family - Laracon Australia happening in 2018. In the post Paul Redmond talks with Michael Dyrynda about the conference.

On the Laravel News Podcast #50, Michael Dyrynda announced Laracon’s first trip “down under” in October 2018. The venue will be right in the heart of Sydney, Australia.

Michael answers questions about the venue they're thinking about using, potential speakers, how long it will be and the role that sponsorships will play. You can find out more about the event on the main conference site and follow them on Twitter for the latest updates as they're announced.

Ken Guest has a recent post talking about some recent updates that have been made surrounding the PEAR support for finding holiday dates in various parts of the world.

In the space of just under a month Date_Holidays_Croatia and Date_Holidays_Australia were released – many thanks to the guys who did the actual hard work to be fair as all I did was package them up and release them!

You can find more of these Date packages on the PEAR site that could help you and your application get things a bit more localized. He also reminds you that, if you'd like to help out and pick up support for some of the older, unmaintained packages, you can follow this guide and get started easily.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a reminder for his upcoming PHPUnit workshops happening in Melbourne, Australia (Aug 4th-6th) and in Brisbane (Aug 11th-12th and 14th).

A few seats are still available for both of these workshops. Secure your seat today! I am also available for in-house training, coaching, and consulting around the days of the workshops.

You can save your spot for one of these events by visiting this page and entering you info (you'll want the "Quality Assurance in PHP Projects" option).