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AFUP Day 2024 Lille: Our Recap

By Louis-Arnaud Catoire

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AFUP Day 2024 Lille: Our Recap

Recap of AFUP Day 2024

On May 24, 2024, the Théâtre de la Comédie in Lille hosted AFUP Day 2024 for the 6th consecutive time. As every year, the day brings the PHP community of northern France together around high-quality technical talks, in a setting that is both friendly and stimulating. If you did not follow AFUP Day 2023 (in French), we already covered the previous edition in Lille.

This year, our Symfony agency in Lille (in French) not only attended the event but also sponsored it to support the Lille PHP community. Sponsoring is a concrete way for us to contribute to an ecosystem we care about and to strengthen our ties with the developers of the region. This community involvement is one of the good reasons to join Efficience IT (in French) for people who care about the PHP ecosystem.

What is AFUP Day?

Created in 2019 by the AFUP (Association Française des Utilisateurs de PHP, the French PHP users association), this multi-city conference day takes place every year. The 2024 edition is held in four different cities depending on the year, each with its own program. Local chapters run the project. They bring together local speakers and headliners who share their expertise with the enthusiasts in the room.

For this event, AFUP Day Lille selected a panel of about ten speakers, each with their own specialty. The day offers a series of talks of about 20 to 40 minutes on PHP and its ecosystem, and gathers developers from the Hauts-de-France region and the surrounding areas. The format is ideal for exploring new topics in depth without taking several days off, which makes it a favorite among technical teams.

Migrating to API Platform 3.x: the ultimate upgrade path

Vincent Chalamon, an expert developer at Les-Tilleuls.coop and a member of the API Platform core team, spoke about why migrating to API Platform 3.x matters. This version brings significant improvements in performance, flexibility and maintainability, but the migration can be a challenge for many projects, especially those that rely on complex configurations inherited from version 2.

Vincent shared practical advice on handling the edge cases of this migration and detailed the upgrade path that API Platform provides to understand its steps. He stressed the importance of a gradual approach, starting with the simplest endpoints before tackling the resources that need deeper changes. An essential talk for any team considering this version upgrade.

Building quality into a "legacy" project

Rachid Hammaoui, a PHP developer for more than 15 years and a Symfony fan since version 1, tackled the topic of introducing quality into "legacy" projects. With decades of accumulated code, it can be hard to adopt modern code quality practices without breaking everything. Rachid shared strategies to introduce practices such as automated tests (in French), static analysis with PHPStan (in French), code reviews and refactoring gradually, while minimizing disruption.

His presentation highlighted the importance of convincing teams and management of the value these practices add. He also presented concrete metrics to measure the gradual improvement in quality on an existing project, proving that even an old project can reach a satisfactory level of reliability with a well-thought-out strategy.

Profiling your PHP application for free

Valentin Silvestre, who holds a master's degree in development and is passionate about Symfony, dove into the world of PHP profiling by exploring the free solutions available. He highlighted the benefits and features of these tools, giving developers a detailed view of how to hunt bugs and optimize performance without spending a cent.

Among the tools presented, Valentin compared their respective capabilities in detecting bottlenecks, analyzing memory consumption and tracking SQL queries. This talk was a reminder that profiling should not be a luxury reserved for large teams, but a practice open to every PHP developer who cares about the performance of their applications.

PHP: Particularly Horrible Programs

Gina Banyard, funded by the PHP Foundation to maintain and improve PHP, gave a playful talk exploring the unadvisable but technically possible sides of the PHP language. The presentation revealed PHP's quirks while stressing the importance of fully understanding the language's capabilities and limits.

Through examples as creative as they were puzzling, Gina showed that some language behaviors, although syntactically valid, can lead to completely unexpected results. As entertaining as it was instructive, the talk reminded developers how important it is to know PHP's internals to avoid the most common pitfalls in production.

Firefox release management

Pascal Chevrel, involved in the Mozilla project since 2001 and Release Manager for Firefox since 2018, shared the behind-the-scenes of the Firefox release management process at Mozilla. The presentation offered a fascinating look at how a team regularly ships a browser to millions of users around the world.

Pascal detailed the release cycles, the validation processes and the rollback mechanisms in place to guarantee the browser's stability. This look at a project of such scale helped attendees put their own deployment challenges in perspective and draw inspiration from practices proven at scale.

Lessons learned on API Platform V3 from a C# developer

Laura Durieux, who holds a degree in web design and development and is currently a full-stack developer at Inside Software, shared her experience as a C# developer using API Platform V3. The presentation offered a valuable outside perspective on the pros and cons of this new version, giving PHP developers an idea of what to expect when they move to this platform.

Her fresh view, unbiased by years of PHP practice, highlighted API Platform strengths that the community often takes for granted, as well as friction points that regulars no longer notice. It was a refreshing angle that sparked many exchanges during the Q&A session.

Microservices, maximum agony

Yann Jacquot, an architect and coach at Theodo, and Alexis Stefanski, a tech lead at CircularX, presented a case study on merging microservices into a monolith. Their talk highlighted the challenges they faced and the strategies they used to solve the performance problems caused by poorly designed microservices.

This talk shed light on an industry-wide trend: the return to the monolith after years of excessive fragmentation. Our article on choosing between microservices and a modular monolith (in French) analyzes this trend in depth. The two speakers showed, with figures to back it up, how consolidating their services reduced latency, simplified deployment and restored a much higher development velocity.

GitLab and Drupal: toward more effective project management

Ines Wallon, a computing enthusiast active in the open source community, discussed the importance of effective project management by integrating GitLab and Drupal. The presentation stressed how important it is to automate development processes and to have teams collaborate to ensure a project's success.

Ines presented concrete workflows that connect GitLab CI/CD pipelines to Drupal deployments, illustrating how a well-thought-out integration can transform a development team's daily work and considerably reduce human error during releases.

Containerized PHP applications: lessons learned and best practices

Kevin Dunglas, creator of the API Platform framework and of projects such as FrankenPHP, shared his experience in containerizing PHP applications. The presentation explored best practices for making PHP tools compatible with development, continuous integration and production environments, while highlighting the challenges and solutions he encountered.

Kevin covered the specifics of PHP in a containerized context, from managing extensions to optimizing Docker images and OPcache caching strategies. To understand what FrankenPHP does in practice (in French) and why Docker is essential in production (in French), his mastery of the subject let attendees leave with recommendations they could apply directly to their projects.

Conclusion

About ten talks later, we reached the end of AFUP Day 2024. It was a pleasure to gather with fellow enthusiasts and see familiar faces again. The diversity of the topics, from technical migration to release management, profiling and application architecture, shows the richness of the PHP ecosystem and the vitality of its community.

The developer team will attend the next edition, and you can read the recap of AFUP Day 2025 Lille (in French). In the meantime, we will attend the events run by the AFUP, such as Forum PHP on October 10 and 11, 2024.

Interested in our PHP expertise? Contact us today to discuss your projects and find out how we can help you reach your goals!

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