We've all been there. Whether it's inheriting a codebase with a lot of CSS debt or just careless mistakes from the past coming to haunt us in the present. In this talk, I will share some strategies my coworkers and I have taken when refactoring CSS bloat. Through this talk, you should expect to learn from my mistakes and have a better understanding on what approaches you can do to manage CSS technical debt.

Let's face it, REST APIs can be problematic, and hypermedia hasn't quite proven to be the answer we've looked for. GraphQL has quickly become more popular offering a solution to the problems REST created - but opens back up the very problems REST was created to avoid (remember SOAP?). But what if there was a way to take the best of both: enter API chains. In this session we'll take a look at the pros and cons of REST, GraphQL, and a new specification and library for chaining numerous resource calls into a single HTTP request.

There are many differences that impact the way people experience the digital world. From age and gender, vision and dexterity, to location and education. Each difference affects digital inclusion and experiences. As technologists it is our job to build products that are usable by, and inclusive of, as many people as possible. To do so, it is important that we plan for the many differences that make up our users.

This session details the importance of having an inclusive mindset in the creation of our digital projects. It explains how Inclusive Design allow for producing positive experiences for a wider audience. Attendees will learn four simple guidelines that they can follow to apply Inclusive Design principles across all project phases including: ux, development and content creation. Attendees will leave with the tools they need to reach a bigger user base while also building towards an accessible and inclusive digital world.

This session is intended for anyone who wants to build digital products that reach as many people as possible.

A tour through different useful applications of serverless computing and tools to use across different cloud providers. Follow up with a walkthrough of a completely serverless application that I built to demonstrate some of those uses.

- Initially go through what serverless computing really is and clear up some confusion that arises around serverless computing vs frameworks that have adopted the name.
- This would lead into a brief tour of the popular serverless frameworks that are out there and how useful each one is.
- A tour of cloud provider's serverless offerings (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, IBM Whisk)
- A high level overview of the application I built and what it consists of.
- Things to watch out for when you build a fully serverless application

Software Engineering can be extremely difficult and maddening. But it doesn't have to be. We will explore leveraging various principles to make Software Engineering fun again. We'll make a case for "Better Code" fueling "Faster Development".

Toward building our case, we will explore 5 areas:

* Bad Code vs Agility - What it means to be "Agile" and the impact of Bad Code on Agility.
* Better Code: Enablers - Enabling Concepts for Better Code such as TDD, Clean Code and Patterns, with an eye toward adapting them to various programming paradigms such as Functional and OOP.
* Empowering OOP - If OOP is to be chosen as a paradigm, we'll explore what it means to play to the strengths of this paradigm.
* Web Application Architectures: When building Web Applications, we'll explore various architectures that may hinder or promote a sustainable business fueled by better code.
* TDD: Better Fuels Faster - Leveraging preceding topics, we'll put it all together in describing a workflow leveraging test-driven development for shipping better products ... faster, and having fun doing it.

The end of this talk will showcase code examples of a real-world Kata for building the service layer of a "Ride Hailing Application". It will also link to recorded Kata videos, as well as a "clean slate" branch in my git repository to follow along.

Having made this case, we'll conclude with the positive impact this workflow will have on a team's ability to ship new products and new features at a sustained pace, with high levels of predictability.

While PHP, Symfony and Doctrine are used for code examples, concepts in this talk are applicable to all PHP frameworks and environments, as well as other programming languages such as Java, PHP and C#.

Discover how you can take the stress out of building website and app designs by understanding design concepts and principles from the past. Starting in the early 1900's design principles were established to help those dealing with usability and information design. See how you can take those same principles and apply them to modern visual art and design.
1. Form follows function
Form follows function is a principle associated with 20th-century modernist industrial design which states that the shape of an object should be primarily relate to its intended function or purpose. See how this concept applies to website and app design of today.
2. Less is more
Less is more was made popular by industrial designer Dieter Rams. With all the information “noise” out there this mantra is more important now than ever. Find out how you can iterate your content to show less distractions, and offer your user more relevant information.
3. Always use a grid
During the time of the International typographic style era, grids were heavily used for a purpose. Using a grid is the best way to organize a great amount of content in a manner that is easily interpreted by viewers. Discover how to use grids for both layout and type.
4. Really understand typography
Early in the 20th century Jan Tschichold set forth rules for standardization of practices relating to modern type usage that are still relevant today. At the time he condemned all typefaces except for sans-serif types, advocated standardized sizes of paper and set forth guidelines for establishing a typographic hierarchy when using type in design. Find out how to use these same concepts in your designs.
5. Follow proportions that work
Some designers may intuitively know where to place objects and text on a screen, but many also rely on basic principles of math that allow them to place type and images quickly and with confidence. Discover some of the proportional rules that you can apply to your layouts.

Whether you're just starting out or an expert PHP developer, you've probably heard the dreaded line, "Works on my machine." Docker is quickly taking hold as the answer to this problem by making virtualization faster and more flexible than ever before.

In this walk-through, we'll take a step-by-step look at exactly how to set up a PHP application using Docker. Along the way we'll explore how Docker works, why containers are an improvement over virtual machines, and how this setup can eliminate differences between local and production environments.

No no, not country flags, feature flags! Feature flags are a powerful technique that allows teams to modify a system's behaviour without changing code. They can be used several reasons - canary releases and A/B testing to name a few.

This talk will show you how you're already using feature flags in your application without realising it. Next, we'll take a look at some of the best tooling out there to help you take feature flags to the next level. Finally, we'll cover strategies for removing feature flags before they become technical debt that you have to manage.

On the East Coast, our startups are known for being able to solve hard tech problems, but often companies get more excited about their technology than in the customer value they're creating. In this talk, we introduce practical framework for building customer-centered tech products. You will learn how to craft and communicate a far-reaching vision and strategy centered around customer needs, and balance that vision with the day-to-day needs of your company.

In this talk, we'll cover the following:
- Intro & Radical Vision: What's a "good" vision? How do you craft a good vision and align your team to that vision?
- Product Strategy: What are the elements of a product strategy? How do you translate your vision into an actionable strategy?
- Prioritization into a Roadmap: How do you translate strategy into a roadmap, especially with the revenue pressures you face as a startup? How do you recognize and pay down "Vision Debt"
- Metrics That Matter: Many of the popular metrics may not apply to your tech product. How do you align metrics & measurement to your product strategy and vision, so you can measure what matters.

Let's change the quality assurance mindset. Application testing plays a critical role in the application development process, what good is a product that doesn't work? Though, how should we test? What should we test? and when should quality assurance play a role in the process?

In an ideal world users would use applications we build in specific predefined ways allowing us to build for the happiest of happy path scenarios. Though in reality, that doesn't always happen. This talk will dive deep into how testing your application in unexpected ways at different points of the development process can allow you to discover bugs and hidden vulnerabilities and will conclude with a live demo inviting members from the audience to try and test some applications in the wild. It will be exciting, it will be daring, and most importantly it will highlight the true joys of quality engineering.

It's pretty common for developers to go with the same kinds of authentication handling when they're creating their applications with permissions and groups. Unfortunately, as applications grow in side an interact with other systems, this kind of system sags under the weight of its own technical debt. Follow along with me as I talk about some alternatives to the typical RBAC authorization including attribute-based, multifactor, pattern-based and federated identity providers.

This unconference session will be an attendee-driven community discusion for anyone interested in User Experience Design.

Jenna Quindica was working at her third startup when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Her journey has been a rocky one, marked by medication changes, mental health days, and more. She wouldn't have been able to maintain her full-time software engineering job without help, support, and encouragement from her manager and coworkers. Jenna will share how she navigated a diagnosis and now a chronic, mental illness. This is a story with a happy ending. Attendees will walk away feeling more comfortable discussing mental health in the workplace and everyday life.

With the advent of distributed systems with such as Docker and Kubernetes, it was truly only a matter of time before our data solutions obtained the same structural needs. This talk will take a look at the history of databases, from relational databases like PostGres, to NoSQL solutions, to sharding, and truly distributed databases like Crate.io.

With each step, this talk will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each system with an eye toward security, sanity, and the future.

Even legacy code should have test coverage.
Finding the right places to put those tests, however is really hard. How do you add support unit tests when most of your code is tightly coupled?

We'll discuss a number of strategies to find seams in your existing legacy code, which libraries make this easier and help us test more and deeper into our legacy codebases.
We also will cover valuable metrics to measure for progress, how we should approach the issue of continually improving our tests.

By the end of this talk the audience should have a better understanding of what a seam is, how to leverage them to test code, how to use mocking libraries and runtime replacement to help get better test coverage.
Most importantly we'll all walk away feeling like we can tackle refactoring and new features with confidence.

Join us at the kickoff of this year's social event night for activities, fun, and prizes

Northeast PHP's event night will continue in the café with free appetizers and time for networking and socializing

Chris Cornutt and websec.io host a "Capture the Flag" security game. Bring a laptop, join a team, and get hacking to sharpen your security skills