I’ve got some public speaking engagements coming up in the next few months which you may or may not be interested in! Both are focussed on software performance.

First up is PHPNW2013 in Manchester this coming weekend 5-6th October. My talk is called “Making PHP Go Fast” and is about, err, making PHP go fast. Here is the blurb:

If you need PHP to run _really_ fast then the usual approach of building on top of an off-the-shelf framework doesn’t cut it. It is possible to achieve some serious PHP performance by taking a fresh look at how to build large scale applications and embracing simplicity. We’ll look at how to achieve response times measured in single-digit milliseconds and how to scale your codebase to keep your application this fast forever more. This is not about changing your quotes from double to single but about completely changing the way you think about coding!

And here’s the linky: http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw13/schedule/dan-rathbone/

Next up is Velocity Europe in London, 14-15th November. Velocity is a conference focussed on Web Performance and Operations and once again I’m talking about performance! 🙂 My talk is called “Code is Evil” and is about trying to write less code to make things run faster. Here’s the blurb:

“I am Lead Software Performance Engineer at Sky Betting and Gaming; an online betting company. The online betting industry presents an interesting performance challenge in that our traffic is not only large but very spiky. Add to this time sensitive data, complex features and monolithic systems and you have the perfect performance storm! This talk will discuss how we achieved an order of magnitude improvement in performance by applying the KISS principle to our code and simply writing less of it!

I’ll look at how we re-wrote our mobile website while baking in some performance best practice. I’ll look at how we ripped things up and started again with our platform architecture, PHP framework, JS frameworks, database and development approach. We’ve taken advantage of some things we’ve learned from previous Velocity conferences (e.g. WPT and FastClick). Along the way I’ll be throwing the software engineering handbook out the window and flying in the face of convention in the hope of stirring up a little controversy! 😉 I’ll also look at our empirical evidence based approach to making implementation choices based on automated performance testing.”

And the link: http://velocityconf.com/velocityeu2013/public/schedule/detail/30366

Should be a fun few months!