Alongside an outstanding team and a selection of excellent speakers, I recently hosted the inaugural PHP Yorkshire event. This is a few of my thoughts on how the event went from an organisers perspective.

A lot of people blog about picking the right tool for the job and this usually focuses on programming languages, techniques and databases. However it is just as important to pick the right tool for your development life cycle. I have worked with a number of clients who have defaulted to scrum as their ‘agile’ process but a lot of the time this is inappropriate for the way they are working. Just as picking the wrong database for your data can lead to development overhead, picking the wrong agile technique can also have issues.

Laravel is probably the closest thing that the PHP community has to Marmite, it seems you either love it or hate it. It’s proponents love how easy it makes developing software; whereas it’s detractors accuse the framework of promoting bad practices. They can’t both be right or can they?