The Laravel News site has posted an announcement about the latest in their series of Laracon events: Laracon Online 2019.

Laracon Online 2019 is coming to a couch near you on March 6th, 2019! Back and better than ever in this 2019 edition, you will hear from the likes of Laravel creator Taylor Otwell, Tighten Partner and Laracon US speaker Matt Stauffer, Refactoring UI tag-team Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger, Laracon US speakers Freek Van Der Herten and Samantha Geitz, and Laracon 2018 EU speaker Marcel Pociot.

Just like last year, the event is hosted entirely online and the event is super affordable for the early bird price of $12. No hotels, no airfare, just signup and spend the day watching some of the best speakers right from your computer.

And there's good news for those out there wanting to attend the event - they're giving away 355 tickets for free based on the generous donations from several sponsors. Naturally, if you can afford the $12 (that's like 2 cups of fancy coffee!) then don't enter the drawing. They want as many people as possible to enjoy the event. If you're interested in the kind of content presented at these events, check out last year's talks or just head over and get your ticket now.

Freek Van der Herten has made a new post to his site sharing some of the things he thinks that could help to improve PHP conferences in general, not just ones in a particular area of the world.

The past year something has bothered me about the traditional formats most conferences in the PHP ecosystem seem to adhere to. I recently went to DotJS: a JavaScript conference which was organized very differently from the majority of PHP conferences I attended previously.

In this blog post, I'd to highlight what PHP conferences, in general, could consider copying from a conference like DotJS.

Among his suggestions are topics like:

• shortening the talk length
• making lightning talks a "first-class citizen"
• appointing a Master of Ceremony
• avoiding the Q&A portion of the sessions

There's a few other suggestions he offers to around audience seating and how many tracks to have. He spends some time on each point, explaining some of his thoughts and how it relates back to his experience at other conferences outside of the PHP community.

According to a new post on the Laravel News site, the date and venue for this 2019 edition of the Laracon conference have been announced. This next event will be happening in New York City in July of next year!

Laracon VII is coming to Playstation Theater in Times Square, NYC on July 24th-25th, 2019! Taylor Otwell made the announcement today with a sweet laracon.us website by Jack McDade.

They haven't posted any information about speakers or tickets yet but if you sign up for their mailing list you'll be notified as soon as there's an update. If you're interested in sessions that have been presented at previous Laracon conferences, check out the videos from the 2018 conference featuring speakers such as Freek Van der Herten, Jason McCreary, TJ Miller, and Laravel creator Taylor Otwell.

As Freek Van der Herten mentions in his latest post, the videos for the sessions at this year's Laracon AU conference (their first year) have been posted to YouTube.

This year Laracon AU was held for the very first time. According to what I read on Twitter Michael Dyrynda did an awesome job organising it.

The organisation was so kind to record all talks. They are now available on YouTube. You'll find all talks in this playlist.

Sessions from their inaugural event included:

• A real-life journey into the opinionated world of 'utility-first' CSS
• Turning stories into software
• Understanding git - even the scary parts
• Level up with a Microservices architecture

...and many more. Check out the full playlist for all of the great sessions including a keynote from Taylor Otwell introducing the Laravel Telescope introspection tool.

Christoph Rumpel has posted a recap of his experience at Laracon EU talking about chatbots and some details on the chatbot he created for the event.

For my book and video-course about building chatbots in PHP I created the Laracon EU conference chatbot. In this article, I will give you all the insights into this project.

On the 12th of July this year, I released my first ebook/video-course called Build Chatbots with PHP. In the last chapter, you can follow me as I create a chatbot for a real client: The Laracon EU conference chatbot. A chatbot that was made to provide information about the Laracon EU conference on <a href="https://m.me/laraconeu>Facebook and Telegram. This article is about my learnings of this projects.

He starts off by talking about the desire to "be real" with his example and how abstract examples, while helpful in the short term, don't provide much value past that. He created the course with this in mind, providing a real-world example to show users the ins and outs of chatbots. He also suggests not messing up the first implementation and points out that chatbots work great with events. He covers some of the features of the bot and how he worked around some differences between the two social media services. He ends the post with some statistics of the users of the bot and the feedback he received.

On the Symfony blog they've posted an announcement about the launch of the SymfonyLive Paris 2019 website, the Symfony-focused event happening March 28th and 29th in Paris, France.

Last week, we announced the dates of the next edition of the French SymfonyLive conference, March 28-29. Today we're very pleased to announce that the conference website is now online! Early bird registration is open as well as the >Call For Papers. You can start submit your talk proposals (in French) for the conference. CFP will be open until December 17th (included). We encourage you to submit several talk proposals to increase your chances of selection.

[...] Early bird registration is open until December 17th (included). You can register for the 2 days of conference on March 28-29 for 239€ (breakfast, lunch, food for both days and your free conference t-shirt are included)! We organize pre-conference workshops on March 26-27, the workshops' topics will be announced soon, stay tuned!

If you're curious to see what kind of content has been presented in the past at SymfonyLive conferences, check out their YouTube channel. Otherwise, start getting those ideas submitted!

The PHPUgly podcast, hosted by PHP community members Eric Van Johnson, John Congdon, and Thomas Rideout, has posted their latest episode: Episode #122 - Waving goodbye to #WavePHP18

This month the team discusses the first ever WavePHP as well as some photos from the conference.

Other topics mentioned include the Joind.in page for WavePHP, an comment about the location of .env files and an article from Bruce Schneier about counting people through the wall with wifi. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get updates when new shows are released.

On the Symfony blog there's a new post for those that have been putting off getting their tickets to SymfonyLive London and, more specifically, the pre-conference workshops. Time is limited and the training sessions are almost sold out!

All Symfony conferences come with pre-conference workshops. We organized them to enable the conference attendees to get trained on Symfony and its ecosystem just before the conference, during special workshops sessions at a very special price. The idea is to get the most out of the conference and enhance your Symfony skills before learning new tips and tricks from the speakers’ experience during the conference. We organize 4 different pre-conference workshops at SymfonyLive London 2018 on September 27th and they are almost all sold out!

They also share a listing of the pre-conference workshops happening at this year's event:

• "Symfony 4 Best Practices" by Nicolas Grekas from Symfony
• "Building API-driven apps with API Platform" by Kévin Dunglas from Les-Tilleuls.coop
• "Symfony Messenger" by Samuel Rozé, creator of the component
• "Lightning Fast Tests" by Jakub Zalas, Symfony core team member

Each workshop title in the post is a link to more information about the workshop and how to pick up your tickets. For more information about the conference, ticket pricing and to order yours, check out the main conference site.

On the Symfony blog they've posted the second part of their announcement about the speakers that will be presenting at the SymfonyCon Lisbon conference in December.

We announced last Monday the first part of the conference schedule for SymfonyCon Lisbon 2018. We’re now very happy to announce the second part of the schedule. Discover the conference schedule! We’re extremely pleased to welcome the following speakers (in alphabetical order) and their talks at the conference.

Speakers and sessions in this announcement include:

• Pedro Magalhães: "Changing PHP"
• Jeremy Mikola: "Bulletproof MongoDB"
• Michelle Sanver: "Using the Workflow component for e-commerce"
• Miro Svrtan: "When Testing Makes No Sense"

They'll also be joined by Symfony creator and project lead Fabien Potencier with an opening keynote.

On the Symfony blog they've posted an announcement about the release of the schedule for Symfony Loves PHP USA 2018, an event replacing SymfonyLive USA happening October 11th and 12th in San Francisco.

We’re super thrilled to announce that SymfonyLive USA becomes now Symfony Loves PHP USA conference!

Welcome to Symfony Loves PHP USA, the only conference dedicated to Symfony and PHP in the USA. We decided to change the conference name and its purpose to create a unique place in the USA where you can hear all the latest and best developments with Symfony and PHP! We aim to gather the American Symfony and PHP communities in San Francisco from October 11th to October 12th. We want you to come and feel welcome regardless your level of development with Symfony or PHP (beginner, advanced, intermediate).

Speakers at this year's event include:

• Jordi Boggiano
• Kristen Costagliola
• Cal Evans
• Jeremy Mikola
• Dave Stokes
• Jonathan Wage

...and many more. Topics range from "soft skills" like general career advice out to more technical topics like single page applications and Doctrine+Symfony. You can find out more about the schedule and the conference on the event's main page and even order your tickets for this great event!