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.

For those that weren't able to make it to the Laracon US 2018 (Chicago) conference, the Laravel News site has posted a recap of the event and their experiences.

Laracon US 2018 is now in the books and it was a fantastic event and a lot of fun was had in Chicago. As someone who has never visited Chicago before I was very impressed with the city. The weather was magnificent and the parts I walked around seemed safe and pretty clean for a large city.

[...] Every Laracon strives to bring a great experience from the venue to the location, the swag, and this year didn’t disappoint.

The post then goes on to talk about some of the swag the conference handed out, the venue where it was held and a link to the keynote from Laravel creator Taylor Otwell (and a matching live blog). The post also includes several pictures the author (Eric Barnes) took during the conference.

The Laravel News site has posted a recap of the Laravel Online conference that happened back on March 8th (2017).

The first Laracon Online conference just wrapped up and based on feedback many loved the event. I want to personally thank the Laravel community for helping make this a reality.

[...] We had developers from all over the world hanging out in Slack, watching the live stream, and socializing. It got a little crazy at times but everyone behaved, and it was fun watching the room scroll so fast that even the world champion speed reader would have trouble keeping up.

The post includes feedback from the attendees of the conference, a brief summary of each of the talks presented and a list of sponsors and other resources to get more detail on the event.

The Laravel News podcast, hosted by Matt Stauffer and Jack Fruh, has posted their latest show - Episode #23: The Laracon US Recap Episode.

In this episode, we talk about last weeks Laracon, some of our favorite talks, and the new Laravel News.

Topics mentioned in the episode include the video of Taylor Otwell covering the new features coming in v5.3, this recap post that includes slides from the presentations and the release of the new Laravel News site design. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by subscribing to their feed and getting links to this and other recent shows.

For those that weren't able to make it to this year's Laracon US conference (just wrapped up in Louisville, Kentucky) the Laravel News site has you covered. They've posted a wrapup of the event today with a bit of coverage for each day of the event and some overall thoughts and feelings.

Hundreds of developers fought the airline industry to arrive in downtown Louisville for the annual Laravel conference. This year’s event was a sell-out with around 550 developers and had people attending from all over the world. At last count, twenty-four different countries were represented.

The conference location was a mirror of last year and held at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts. Even though it was the same location every part of the event was bigger than ever.

The post talks about the variety of speakers at this year's event and the inclusion of a live stream of the sessions being presented. Each session was recorded so getting into the details of each wouldn't be as useful. Instead he goes through each day and talks briefly about what happened, announcements and highlights from certain speakers. The post ends with some links to a few of the slide decks of presentations given at the event (with more to follow I assume).

With all the talk about PHP7 and the features that are coming with it, it's easy to get lost in the mound of information. Thankfully, the SitePoint PHP blog is here to help. They've posted a roundup of several PHP7-related resources you can use to sort things out (or start learning about) what's to come.

PHP 7 is well on its way. RFCs are being implemented and polished, projects are being tested, libraries upgraded. Extensions are being modified, and the word is spreading. All that remains is getting the shared hosts on the upgrade bandwagon – the arguably most difficult part of improving the global state of PHP. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most important PHP 7 related resources and tips you should go through in preparation for the new version.

Mentions in their list include both tutorials and tools including the PHP7 Vagrant box provided by Rasmus Lerdorf and the Go PHP7 Extensions effort to update extensions to be PHP7 ready. Following this there's serveral links to other important reading about what to expect and results of testing done with this upcoming version.

Hugh Williams has a new post with his recap of the "PHP at Scale" panel from this year's PHP UK Conference.

The good news was that Rasmus and Nikolay couldn’t see any reasons why PHP was particularly challenging. What we saw were general challenges in scaling applications to large traffic volumes – and that’s pretty much where the panel discussion went. Here's a few key points from the discussion.

Highlighted points included: removing bottlenecks to help performance (simple in theory, hard in practice), the fact that PHP should never be the bottleneck, the "odd direction" of HipHop, challenges/growing pains in moving from startup to a large web property. There was also a less technical discussion about "scaling teams" and finding the right (motivated) people to do the job.

On the Liip blog today there's a write up from David Buchmann about the just-passed Symfony Live conference that happened in Paris. his recap covers some of the high points of the event including sessions from the Liip-ers in the crowd.

Last week, there was the Symfony Live conference in Paris. The conference was surprisingly big, about 500 developers came together in the impressing building of Cité Universitaire Internationale. The main topic was of course the upcoming Symfony2 release. We had two days of talks and a hackday on Saturday, and lots of fun every night. The topics are on the conference website, some discussion and slides are on joind.in.

He mentions some of the "state of Symfony2" updates that were mentioned and some of the talks that were given by the Liip employees including ones on the Symfony2 CMF project, RabbitMQ and Symfony2, security and Javascript.

In a new post to his blog Keith Casey, a speaker on the CodeWorks conference tour, has recapped some of his experiences as a part of the five city tour.

Approximately 10 days ago, I finished the 2010 CodeWorks Tour. This time around with 4 speakers hitting 5 cities, it was smaller, more compact, and generally a little more intimate of an experience. Due to the odd nature of this one, I'm going to skip my usual "Good, Bad, Ugly" conference review format and go straight to some highs & lows.

He breaks it up into a few different topics - the venues (naming Portland as the champ), the presentations he gave and how they progressed over the course of the tour, the attendees, user group involvement and, unfortunately, the TSA hassle they had to deal with.

By my standards, CodeWorks 2010 was a success. By having a smaller team than last year, it was simpler and easier, but more importantly, the single-track nature kept everything focused, moving, and made sure everyone could participate together.

For those not able to make it to this year's WordCampNYC, Keith Casey has written up a recap of his experiences there (along with a few notes of appreciation for some of those involved in the conference).

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend WordCamp NYC 2009. Overall, it was a blast but there are some specific sessions and people I'd like to point out as particular stand outs. [...] Overall, WordPress NYC 2009 was a great time. Jane Wells deserves lots of thanks for getting things organized and keeping things moving. These events wouldn't come together without dedicated and motivated people making them happen.

His "shoutouts" went to Raphael Mudge (After the Deadline), Brad Williams, Mark Jaquith, Aaron Brazell and Daryl Koopersmith.