If you've considered starting up a technical conference and wanted to get an inside look at what it takes, check out this recent post from Thijs Feryn about what it takes for the PHPBenelux organization to make the PHPBenelux Conference happen each year.

The PHPBenelux Conference edition 2016 took place last week in Antwerpen (Belgium). As an organizer, I’m really happy with the end result. I like to think that our attendees, speakers and sponsors also enjoyed it. It’s the 7th time we organize the PHPBenelux Conference and every year we try to introduce something new. Although the 7 years of experience and the well-organized crew have made it a lot easier to organize, it’s still a lot of work.

This post gives you a behind the scenes look at what it takes to organize the PHPBenelux Conference. It will reflect our passion, our strengths and our weaknesses.

The article covers what the conference is all about and what the name (PHPBenelux) represents. They also talk about some of the things that are important to them as an organization, the venus they've used for the past several years and some of the things that annoy them a bit about it. The article goes on to mention each of "the crew" behind the event, volunteers they have helping out and more about this year's event including the theme, how they handled sponsors and spending funds to make the event happen. They also cover one of the more fun things from this year's conference: the bumper cars from the speakers dinner.

Finally they end with a list of "lessons learned" and things they see they can do to help improve the event for years to come.

In this recent post to his site Henrik Warne has shared a list of advice around software development and some good practices he's picked up along the way.

Here is my list of heuristics and rules of thumb for software development that I have found useful over the years.

His list includes several points related to a few main categories:

• Development
• Troubleshooting
• Cooperation (personal, not code)
• Other Miscellaneous Tips

Each main topic has a few sub-topics and each of those includes a brief description (with twenty-two tips in the list overall). There's some great advice in the list as well as some good contributions in the comments, so be sure to read through those too.

In a new post to his site Justin Carmony shares some of his experiences with doing test-driven development (TDD) for a new project he was working on interfacing with the Omniture API. In it he shares six lessons he learned during the work.

At work we use Omniture for our web analytics, and for a long time I've wanted query our Omniture Data to run some internal reports. I discovered that Omniture has a restful reporting api, and after using it for a little bit I decided it would be nice to write a wrapper library for it. Since I had recently taken the PHP Testing Bootcamp from Chris Hartjes, I decided I wanted write it using Test Driven Development and really get my feet wet. I also decided I wanted to make the library compatible with Composer. After the weekend was over, I had an almost finished library that just requires some more work to be done, but I learned a great deal that I thought I'd share.

He's broken the post up into sections, each with their own summary:

• TDD is 90% changing the way to write code, and 10% writing tests
• Understanding Mock Objects is the real key.
• It takes almost twice as long to write code and tests then just code
• Its extremely easy to get out of the habit of writing tests.
• You'll refactor quicker and more often when writing tests
• Having testable code made me feel much better about sharing the code.

Rafael Dohms has a new post to his blog about some of the lessons he learned attending this year's PHP Benelux conference both from the perspective of attending the conference and having been at several conferences around the world.

After hearing about how great PHP Benelux Conferences were I finally made it over to Belgium to check it out, and i was impressed. To catch you up on the new, I moved to Amsterdam last december and thus had the chance of attending the conference which is now 2 hours away on a train ride. I could not expect less of a wonderful conference when names like Michelangelo van Dam are involved and this was no exception.

Among his suggestions, there's things like:

• Value your sponsors
• Value your attendees
• Make your attendees pay
• Value the organizers and your volunteers

...and one of the most important ones: "Have Fun!" If you're not following this piece of advice, you're probably doing it wrong.