php[architect] magazine has republished an article from their January 2018 issue by Jeremy Dorn that covers PHP sessions in-depth.

HP Sessions are often taken for granted. A session is a magic array which persists across page loads and holds user-specific data. It’s a fantastic and integral part of most web applications. But when misused, sessions can cause substantial security holes, performance and scalability problems, and data corruption. A deep understanding of sessions is vital to production web development in PHP.

The article covers various topics around PHP sessions and their use including security, performance and scalability. It also covers a few additional topics like serialization of data, session locking and intelligent auto-merging of sessions on the backend. Check out the full article for descriptions of each and some code examples to help show them in action.

If you weren't able to attend this year's Bulgaria PHP Conference but still want to get in on some of the great content that was presented, you're in luck. They've just posted videos of all recorded sessions over on Vimeo.

Sessions presented at this 2016 event include:

• Andrew Carter: Drinking Beer with a Raspberry Pi and PHP
• Joshua Thijssen: Paradoxes and theorems every developer should know
• Anna Filina: Rewriting 15-Year-Old Code
• Michael Bodnarchuk: Modern Testing with Codeception: Tips and Tricks
• Samantha Quinones: Asynchronous Programming Fundamentals

You can watch these and many more in the full Vimeo album with 28 sessions (including keynotes) on a wide range of topics, not just PHP.

As Freek Van der Herten mentions in his latest post to his site, the videos for all of the sessions at this year's Laracon EU conference have been posted on their official YouTube channel.

This year’s Laracon EU was an amazing conference. The venue was astonishing, there were lots of cool talks and interesting people to talk to. If you’re using Laravel or PHP going to this conference really is a no brainer.

If you were unable to attend or want to see the talk you missed during the conference you can now do so. The organisers have uploaded video’s of all talks to their YouTube channel.

Freek talks briefly about his presentation (covering backups in Laravel applications) and mentions some of the future plans for the backup package that he's created to make it simpler. Other sessions that were presented at the conference also included:

• Evan You - Modern Frontend with Vue.js
• Franz Liedke - Web accessibility for Artisans
• Frank de Jonge - One Box Doesn't fit all
• Geshan Manander - Embrace chatops, stop installing deployment software

The full playlist can be found on the Laracon Youtube channel.

As is mentioned in this new post from the Laravel News site, all of the videos from this year's Laracon US conference are now available online for free.

StreamACon has just published all of the videos from Laracon US and they are available for everyone to watch for free.

Included with all the talks is also videos from the sponsor segments so you can relive the entire conference right from your couch. Except of course mingling with everyone.

These videos include sessions like:

• Adam Wathan - Test Driven Laravel
• Chris Fidao - Servers For Hackers
• Ben Ramsey - Long Live HTTP/2
• Fabien Potencier - PHP Performance Tuning With Blackfire

...and many more. Check out the full page for the entire list of videos and sessions from this year's event.

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).

This year's Bulgaria PHP Conference has officially posted the videos from all of their sessions at this year's event to the official conference website. There's lots of great sessions from this year's event including talks from Larry Garfield, Ilia Alshanetsky and Beth Tucker Long. The full list of videos is a bit long to have here, but here's a sampling:

• Michelle Sanver – Automating and optimizing the frontend workflow using Bower and Gulp
• Adam Culp Keynote: The Accidental Professional
• Andrea Giuliano – Asyncronous data processing
• Sebastian Bergman – How to get ready for PHP 7
• Michelangelo van Dam – Your code are my tests! (Testing Legacy Code)

You can check out the rest of the videos on the conference website or directly over on their Vimeo channel.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted an article from editor Bruno Skvorc reviewing the latest edition of the PHP Summer Camp conference that recently happened in Croatia.

You’re standing on a long pier, the last ten meters of which curiously belong to international waters despite being well inside the current country’s territory. As you climb the meter-high rock wall that forms a small barrier towards the west, you’re able to witness the sun dipping into the sea, far in the distance. Soft waves caress the rocky surface below your feet, bobbing the sea urchins and fish to and fro. There are other people there, each immersed in their own thoughts. No, that’s not a Dungeons and Dragons session starting. It’s the end of a great conference of workshops in Rovinj, Croatia, in the same spirit as [last year’s](http://www.sitepoint.com/phpsummercamp-review).

The PHP Summer Camp was made up of three tracks - two general PHP and one related just to eZ Publish. Bruno starts with a few of the key take-aways that he learned at the event before getting into reviews of each workshop he attended. He goes through each one describing what the session was about and some of the good/bad aspects he noticed. He also shares a "technical realization" he though of during the event around the use of Vagrant and provisioning virtual environments for the attendees. Finally he covers some of the "extras" like the early morning "triathlon" and evening events.

The PHP UK Conference has just posted videos of all the 2015 sessions over on YouTube. The PHP UK Conference this year was a two-day event in London that featured some of the best speakers and sessions the PHP community has to offer. Videos posted include:

• Ben Waine - Application Logging & Logstash
• Beth Tucker Long - Be a Bold Coder
• Billie Thompson - MVVM and Silex - It's the future
• Marcello Duarte - Barely Enough Design
• Gary Hockin - Understanding the OWASP Top 10
• Christopher Hoult - Your API is a UI
• Gordon Skinner - Hexagonal Architecture in DDD

...and many more. There were some great sessions at this year's PHP UK and if you weren't abel to make it, these videos are the perfect chance to catch up.

There's an announcement on the Symfony blog today about the release of parts of the schedule for SymfonyCon Madrid, a conference happening at the end of November (27th - 29th) in Madrid, Spain.

We received a ton of brilliant talk proposals for SymfonyCon Madrid so that we had a very hard time selecting the speakers for the conference but we can finally confirm the first speakers! Year after year, it’s been harder to choose among the great talk proposals you all submitted. We’d like to thank very much all the people who submitted!

Among the sessions released so far are talks like:

• Feature Flags with Symfony
• Life After Assetic: State of the Art Symfony 2 Frontend Dev
• PHP object mocking framework world: let's compare Prophecy and PHPUnit
• Filesystem Abstraction with Flysystem
• Unleash Postgresql features in your PHP developments

These are just a few already released, so be sure to check out the rest of the post or the schedule itself for more details and talk summaries.

A new resource has popped up for those wanting to get even more information about the Laravel PHP framework - the Laracasts.com site. The site is devoted to providing a consolidated listing of Laravel screencasts across the web.

[This site is a] compilation of screencasts from Youtube and Vimeo. Let's learn Laravel together!

There's already a good number of screencasts posted to the site from folks like Taylor Otwell (author of the framework), Jeffrey Way (NetTuts) as well as several recordings of talks from various conferences about the framework. If you have a screencast that's not linked on the site, you can submit the information for review and inclusion.