I am sitting on the train back to Sheffield coming back from an awesome Symfony Live London event. It was my first time at Symfony Live conference, and at the same time it was first edition of the conference held in London. Conference was organised perfectly, but was else could you expect from  people like Lorna Jane and Wes Thompson! Great event guys and very well done!

For a person like me, who only started working with Symfony2 a few months ago, it was a mind blowing mine of information about Symfony2, tools that support symfony2 applications like composer and behat and general practises around using the framework itself. I was pretty impressed by the fact how Drupal8 and Symfony2 work together, and get the famous CRM event better. It definitely proves that PHP as the language, environment and surrounding community matures. The talks in fact were only the background of the opportunities that I had today – meeting in person and being able to talk to people like Fabien Potencier (creator of Symfony2), Jordi Boggiano (the man behind composer), Konstantin Kudryashov (the Behat man) and Marcello Duarte (the PHPSpec man). The conference venue was all buzzing – people talking and exchanging experiences.

I have seen 6 talks in total:

• opening keynote – The Secrets of Building and Participating in Open Source Communities
• In-Depth with Composer
• Things Your Mother Didn’t Tell You About Bundle Configuration
• Easy Backends with Symfony2 and the SonataAdminBundle
• Full Stack BDD for Symfony2
• closing keynote – Symfony, What’s Next?

Every talk was unique and touched on different subject, but I have to admit Konstantin and Marcello just blown my mind off with they approach to testing with BDD. I still can’t get all the things together and they gave me plenty of things to think about. The next thing I will do will be to replicate what they have done with Behat and PHPSpec2 during their presentation.  I do not agree with what they have said about unit testing, and I still believe that unit testing has it’s own place in the development processes, just needs to be used right and for the right purpose. For me the BBD way they have shown us it’s a different approach to testing only complementing xUnit. Anyway have a look at their slides and at Behat and PHPSpec2 if you haven’t yet. PHPSpec2 is still pre,pre,pre,pre,pre,pre,pre,[pre,] alpha, but looks really promising and I can see myself including it in my toolset.

Finally, I’d like to thank everybody who attended my talk Effective Code Reviews and asked all the questions afterwards. It’s been a pleasure to be able to meet you all and exchange all the experiences around code review process. Thanks to everybody who left the feedback on joind.in, and if you have seen my talk and not yet gave me the feedback please do so. It’s very important for me to know what did you like and what not, so I can improve it in the future.

Enough writing, I am too excited about Behat and PHPSpec2 so I am gonna download it and play with it for another hour, and I hope to meet you all again in a year time at the the next Symfony Live! London Conference!