The PHP Roundtable podcast, hosted by PHP community member Sammy K Powers, has posted their latest episode as recorded live at this year's php[tek] conference.

We record live from main stage at php|tek in St. Louis, MO. We discuss speaking at conferences and recent events in PHP-FIG.

Sammy is joined in this episode by fellow community members Gary Hockin, Ben Marks, Samantha Quiñones and Joe Ferguson. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio or video players or directly on YouTube. If you enjoy the episode be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates when new episodes are posted.

Ben Ramsey has a post to his site sharing a few tips for those attending the php[tek] conference this year (though most of them could apply to just about any technology-related conference out there.

This week, I’m attending php[tek]. This is my seventh php[tek], and the first I’ve attended not as a speaker. It’s one of my favorite conferences, and I didn’t want to miss its first year in a new city: St. Louis. As we gear up for the eleventh php[tek] conference, I thought I’d list my seven tips for getting the most out of your php[tek] experience.

His suggestions cover things to help you get the most enjoyment from the conference, and not just from the sessions:

• Hang out in the evenings, after the conference sessions.
• After the conference events, follow folks to the bar.
• Take advantage of the “hallway track,” and don’t forget the regular sessions.
• Attend the morning keynote sessions.
• Join the conference IRC backchannel: #phptek on Freenode.
• Use the official hashtag: #phptek
• Take lots of pictures and upload them to Flickr.

Each of the suggestions comes with a bit of description and photos from previous years. If you're attending this year's conference, I'd definitely recommend talking a look over the full post and getting prepared for a great week of learning and community at this year's conference.

If you've been considering attending the php[tek] conference this year but aren't quite sure what it's all about, you should check out these speaker preview videos for a bit more detail.

A number of our speakers for our php[tek] 2016 conference have graciously offered to make preview videos for us, showcasing what their talk will be out.

We started releasing them a few days ago and will be continuing to do so over the coming week. You can see a full playlist of these from Youtube below. Make sure to pick up your ticket soon, the conference is just 4 short weeks away!

You can find the current list of videos in this playlist over on YouTube that includes speakers like:

• Cal Evans
• Joe Ferguson
• Tim Lytle
• Jeff Geerling
• Doris Chen

If you're ready to pick up a ticket of your own, check out the main conference site for more details about the event, sessions and to order your tickets.

As is mentioned in this quick post to the php[architect] site today, they've posted the schedule for this year's php[tek] conference happening in St. Louis in May.

We are excited to announce the schedule of sessions for php[tek] 2016! We had to sort through over 500 submissions to hand-pick the best 55 talks to fill out our schedule from over 30 internationally based speakers. You can see the schedule online now. Make sure and get your Early Bird Sale tickets and we look forward to seeing you in St. Louis!

There's a huge range of talks happening during this year's event including sessions like:

• "I Promise() to Teach You Asynchronous PHP" (Eric Mann)
• "WordPress Code Performance" (Stéphane Boisvert)
• "Legacy: a Retrospective" (Jessica Mauerhan)
• "Becoming a Polyglot" (Kirsten Jones)
• "Mastering the Basics of OAuth2" (Joseph Maxwell)
• "Professional Development, professional Developers" (Steve Grunwell)
• "On the Road towards PHP 7" (Josh Deckard)

Be sure to check out the full schedule for looks at these and more great topics being covered over the multi-day event. As mentioned, tickets are also already on sale so you can get yours now if there's sessions you'd like to see. You can find more information about the conference in general from the [https://tek.phparch.com](main conference site).

The php[tek] conference has officially announce the opening of their Call for Speakers for the 2016 edition of their conference, happening May 23rd through 27th in St. Louis, Missouri.

PHP runs over 82% of the internet at the moment. Take a moment to think about that staggering statistic. Because of this, the use-cases of PHP are extremely broad, and we want php[tek] to reflect that. We therefore want submissions that cover the entire range of Web Development processes. We want to hear about how PHP is getting the job done throughout the world.

Importantly, we don’t necessarily look for talks that are only about PHP itself. Some of our most successful presentations have been on products built on PHP (such as WordPress, Drupal, and other frameworks) and on technologies that are crucial to building on the web (HTML5, JavaScript, Mobile Development, Apache, Databases, Deployment, etc.)

This Call for Speakers will end January 16th just before midnight UTC so get out there and submit those topic ideas soon! If you're interested in the package provided to speakers see this page on the CfP site or the general conference site for more information on the conference itself.