Food sponsored by 10gen.com and AtlantaPHP

Presentation by Nic Rosental, Epic Labs (@nicdev and @epiclabs)

There comes a time in the life of a developer where s/he’s called upon to do more than coding. Understanding how the rest of the stack interacts with our code is fundamental, but it’s also important that we don’t spend most of our day managing servers.

In this session, we’ll explore what Vagrant and Chef are, how they work together, and what advantages they bring over other methods, both for local development as well as production environments.

We’ll compare Vagrant and Chef to other strategies such as working on remote servers, or using the local stack, and even conventional virtual machines. We’ll explore how to incorporate these tools to our workflow to help us and our teams make infrastructure an asset instead of an obstacle.

Lastly, we’ll go over real world examples that will show in detail the logic behind these systems. During the presentation, attendees will gain enough applicable knowledge to start tailoring solutions to fit their specific use cases and start taking advantage of the latest provisioning strategies.

About Nic: Nic has been long-time member of the PHP user group and served as a co-organizer for 3 years. He is the principal of Epic Labs, a full-service web consultancy in Atlanta.

Presentation by Robert Swarthout, ShootProof.com (@robertswarthout)

Now that you have put hundreds of hours of work into your application and it is all up and running, it’s time to figure out what really is happening under the hood. Sure, you can look into the database and see things changing, but that does not tell the whole story. In this talk, we will quickly install and configure Graphite and StatsD. Once we have those in place, we will go through many use cases for tracking data points that occur in your app that usually are not monitored.

About Robert: Robert has been an attendee of the PHP user group since 2006 and has been doing PHP work since 2003. He is a Co-Founder of ShootProof.com, a web service for professional photographers to share, sell and print their photos.

SPECIAL PRESENTATION: PHPUnit Best Practices

Presentation by: Sebastian Bergmann

NOTE - DATE & DAY - This special event is in addition to our regular meetings, so note that this takes place on Monday, March 25th.

While PHPUnit is not difficult to set up and writing tests with it is easy, you will get better results and save development time if you know the tips and tricks to leverage PHPUnit more effectively. This session, presented by the creator of PHPUnit, teaches best practices you can use to ensure that your unit testing effort is efficiently implemented.

About Sebastian - Sebastian Bergmann (http://thephp.cc, @s_bergmann) has instrumentally contributed to tranforming PHP into a reliable platform for large-scale, critical projects. Enterprises and PHP developers around the world benefit from the tools that he has developed and the experience he shares.

When: Monday, March 25th, 2013 — 7pm-9pm

NOTE - NEW LOCATION – Hypepotamus (see http://atlantaphp.org/directions/)

Presentation by Brian DeShong, CrowdTwist, Inc. (@bdeshong)

After working with PHP and web applications for 12 years, Brian has stored quite a few tricks up his sleeve. In this talk, he will cover his top ten tips and tricks for squeezing maximum performance out of your web applications, PHP or otherwise. Memcached, APC, database query performance, PHP settings you’ve never heard of… nothing will be off limits! He may have some other tricks up his sleeve, too: special guest appearances!

About Brian: Brian DeShong is the Director of Back End Development for CrowdTwist, Inc., a New York City-based startup that provides the most advanced multi-channel Customer Relationship & Loyalty Platform for leading brands such as Pepsi, Miami Dolphins, Sony Music, Zumiez and more. With over a decade of experience, Brian has done and seen it all through the worlds of social media, a marketing agency, Yahoo!, daily deals, and more. When not coding PHP and using open source tools, Brian is actively furthering his experience in Mac and iOS development. He lives in suburban Atlanta with his wife and daughter. He blogs at http://www.deshong.net/

NOTE - NEW LOCATION – Hypepotamus (see http://atlantaphp.org/directions/)

Presentation by Shawn Stratton, Discovery Communications, Inc. (@mfacenet)

As a systems administrator, the focus on how an application is supposed to work and what makes it run is different than as a developer. We’ll take an in-depth look at how Sysadmins approach your application and some of the advanced Unix based tools that are available to bring both Sysadmins and Development into harmony.

Mini-talk: Rod Stafford on “Nature-inspired Algorithms”