Yesterday, after a winter sleep, PHPGent awoke and held a meetup at the offices of In The Pocket. It was nice to see some familiar and some new faces.

I had the honor of being the first speaker. My talk was titled "Backing up with Laravel". I started off with some best practices regarding backups and demonstrated the laravel-backup package which was released a few weeks ago.

Here are my slides:

https://speakerdeck.com/freekmurze/backing-up-with-laravel

Next up was Wouter Sioen of SumoCoders. He talked about building maintainable software. He showed how using the solid principles help to clean up the code of his home brew json to html converter. Then he continued with explaining object calisthenics: a few simple rules to greatly improve the readability of your code. Wouter's slides can found on github.io.

These two very beautiful graphic summaries of the talks were made by Peter Decuyper:

https://twitter.com/sgrame/status/720674134041235456

https://twitter.com/sgrame/status/720690758265778176

If you attended the meetup be sure to leave Wouter and me some feedback on joind.in so we can improve our speaking skills.

Visiting your local PHP user group is one of the best ways to learn new stuff and to getting to know the community. If you've never visited a user group, use this site to lookup the closest one to your home. If there isn't one close by, start one yourself.