On the Laravel News site they've posted an interesting perspective that reflects on some of the speakers from this year's Laracon US (2018) sharing the books some of them have written.

We love books here at Laravel News! The Laracon US 2018 all-star lineup of speakers delivered stellar talks, and many of them have written best-selling books! We thought it would be a good idea to compile a list of books authored by Laracon speakers as well as other books mentioned during their talks.

Books mentioned include:

• Laravel Up and Running
• Clean Architecture
• Rework
• Refactoring to Collections

There are several others in the list, each with a brief summary of their contents and links to a few other related resources.

On the Symfony blog there's a new post announcing the speakers for SymfonyLive London 2018 happening in late September.

We’re very pleased to announce that the conference schedule for this year’s edition of the SymfonyLive conference in London is online. Join us on September 28th for an intense conference day dedicated to Symfony, divided into 2 tracks.

Discover now all the speakers selected and the talks they will present there! We’re very excited to welcome 14 speakers at the conference.

Speakers at this year's event include:

• Michael Cullum
• Nicolas Grekas
• Neal Brooks
• Samuel Roze

Fabien Potencier, founder and project lead for Symfony, will also be there to give the opening keynote for the conference. You can find out more about the conference on the main site and pick up your tickets for either just the training days, just the session days or for a package of both.

The Laracon US conference, being held in Chicago, Illinois in July (2018) has just announced a very special addition to their lineup for this year's event: Robert C Martin (a.k.a. "Uncle Bob").

Laracon US officially announced that Robert C Martin (colloquially known as Uncle Bob) is speaking at Laracon 2018 this year!

Uncle Bob is a well-known software developer, author, and public speaker. He runs a consulting firm Uncle Bob Consulting and cleancoders.com which is home of videos on agile software development and writing clean code, among other software topics.

The post also lists out some of his books and other publications. It also mentions some of the other speakers that will be joining him including Matt Stauffer, Adam Wathan and Taylor Otwell. Their Call for Papers is still open and you can find out more about the conference on the laracon.us website.

On thePHP.cc blog they share some thoughts about conferences and, more specifically, the way that PHP conferences are handled with respect to speaker compensation.

Attending an IT conference is fun. You get to meet people, listen to interesting presentations, maybe even participate in a workshop where you can expand your skills. Furthermore, there is free food, evening activities including parties, and networking. At the very least, it is a break from doing time in the office.

Each tech community, including PHP, has some well-known speakers that frequently present at conferences around the world. Admittedly, we are among them. How cool must it be to get all this excitement of a conference, and even get paid to do it?

Wait a moment. Nobody said that conference speakers get paid to do their job. And in fact, they are not.

They talk briefly about the history of conferences in the PHP community and how, despite the industry standard being to the contrary, they'll often pay for speaker travel/accommodations. Despite the time taken to prepare a presentation at a PHP conference, (most) speakers do not anticipate being paid for the speaking time itself. The post ends with a discussion about the amount of time they (thePHP.cc) spend around conferences and when they expect that an event would help out speakers with costs involved with the event.

On the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc has written up an article that wonders if 9-to-5 developers can be good developers.

While picking talks for the conference he’s organizing, James Titcumb recently tweeted that well known speakers get picked over others because, among other things, they’re reliable (i.e. they don’t cancel). I would argue that “among other things” carries more weight – I believe that most conference organizers pick such talks and speakers because they like to play it safe and fear risks.

Bruno gets into some of his own opinions about conferences and speaker selections first, noting that he sees a lot of organizers "playing it safe" with topics and speakers (and the idea of "intellectual diversity"). He then talks about the 9-to-5 developers out there that haven't been exposed to a lot of these "safe" topics because they don't branch out of their corporate bubble and attend conferences. He ends the post reflecting on one of the most used excuses for not branching outside of work hours - time, it being a "precious resource" and ideas about balance.

The Laravel News site has posted an interview with Justin Jackson, one of the speakers at the upcoming Laracon US conference and creator of Marketing for Developers (among other things).

Laracon US is still a few months away and this year it has an awesome line up of speakers. One of the new faces is Justin Jackson, who is what you could call a habitual maker. He launches more products than I have ideas.

Justin is a former Product Manager and has now transitioned into a full-time product person. He builds products such as Marketing for Developers, runs the MegaMaker podcast, and sells a book named Jolt! What follows is a quick interview with Justin to share some insights into making products and what to expect during his Laracon talk.

In the interview Justin answers questions about his background, his talk at Laracon US and launching products.

On the Tighten blog there's an interview posted with some of the speakers from the recent Laracon Online conference that included Jeffrey Way, Evan You, Jason McCreary and Taylor Otwell.

Wednesday was the inaugural Laracon Online, an online conference devoted to bringing great Laravel teaching to folks who may not be able to attend an in-person conference. Tighten co-founder Matt Stauffer spoke on Laravel's service container, along with Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel; Jeffrey Way, creator of Laracasts; Adam Wathan, Tighten alum; and several more excellent speakers.

During the session, conference attendees asked questions for the speakers to answer after their talks were over. However, the Slack channel was a fast-paced mix of conversations and Q&A, so we wanted to aggregate the Q&A sessions that did happen together in a single place.

The interview consolidates the questions asked of each of the eight speakers including in some cases links to the resources mentioned.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted a roundtable, hosted by Cal Evans, session it recent recorded with several conference organizers sharing what conference organizers wish speakers knew about speaking, the events themselves and how they can improve as a speaker.

Cal is joined by organizers from five different conferences all around the world:

• Adam Culp (Sunshine PHP)
• Chris Cornutt (Lone Star PHP)
• Anna Filina (ConFoo)
• James Titcumb (PHP Southcoast)
• Michelangelo van Dam (PHP Benelux)

You can catch this latest episode in a few different ways either using the in-page audio or video player or by downloading just the audio. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates when new shows are released.

The editor of the SitePoint PHP blog, Bruno Skvorc, has posted a summary of his experience at Bulgaria PHP, a recent PHP conference held in Sofia, Bulgaria back in the beginning of October.

BulgariaPHP is a PHP conference consisting of one workshop day, and two talk days with two tracks each. Just like last year, this year’s conference happened in the SEC (Sofia Event Center) in Sofia, Bulgaria, on the top floor of the Paradise Mall. Unlike last year, however, this year’s edition had a theme.

Excellently organized by the event team at SiteGround, a shared and cloud hosting provider 500 employees strong, the conference was all up in retro gaming, from the attendee badges and decals, to the surroundings and micro-events within the event. Even the crew were all dressed as Super Mario, which I’m sure would have caused an aneurysm or two in the minds of Nintendo’s lawyers had they gotten wind of it.

He talks about his experience as both a speaker and attendee at this year's event (and how he felt "spoiled"). He covers some of the speakers that were at the event, the topics he personally learned about and how the conference itself was handled (sponsors, the theme and the charity the conference provided to a local school).

The Laravel News site has published an interview with one of the speakers for the upcoming Laracon EU Conference, happening at the end of this month (August 2016). In the interview they talk with well-known Laravel-er Freek Van der Herten.

This year’s Laracon EU has a fantastic speaker lineup including twenty-two speakers from all across the world. Tickets are still available and it’s one you will not want to miss.

Freek Van der Herten (@freekmurze) is one of those speakers and he graciously took a break from releasing new packages to allow me the opportunity to ask him a few questions about his talk and the conference experience.

Freek answers questions about his previous experience at Laracon EU, his Laravel-related backup package, other talks he's excited about and words of encouragement to those attending the conference. Check out the full post for his answers to these and other questions.