Knowing SOLID and the GoF patterns is like knowing the traffic rules: you can pass the exam and still crash your car. There’s a huge gap between “I know the Single Responsibility Principle exists” and “I understand why it matters right here.” In that gap live God objects, irreplaceable dependencies, and interfaces no one can actually implement. Using real mistakes from a large-scale project, we’ll explore the difference between knowledge and understanding, how frameworks can hide architectural issues, and why the only way to write maintainable code is to understand the “why,” not just memorize the “how.”

I’ll show practical approaches, common pitfalls, and ready-to-use templates with concise PHP snippets that let you run dozens of parallel features in one cluster, cut costs, and speed up CI.

I’ll share my experience in writing automated tests that help avoid surprises in production and explain how we integrate them with the testing system. At the same time, we’ll discuss whether documentation is really necessary if the tests already “speak” for the system.

Let’s talk about long-running processes in PHP: is there life with API demons in production, what best practices exist and why they’re not always the best, and what exactly to focus on when developing and running them.

Half a year of trial and error with AI across different tasks and technologies: we’ll go through current tools, approaches, and recommendations. What works and what doesn’t. From the wow-effect in demos to wasted days on 'vibecoding'.

Expect field-tested patterns, pitfalls to avoid, and ready-to-reuse templates that keep 200+ services running in production without losing your mind.

During the discussion, we will dive into the world of PHP, discuss its capabilities, best practices and current trends with experts.

In this talk, I'll share my experience as a testing consultant and why testing is the responsibility of the whole team. We'll cover test architecture, including E2E, functional, unit tests, and manual testing. Special attention will be given to popular PHP testing tools such as PHPUnit, Codeception, Pest and Behat, as well as non-PHP testing tools such as Cypress, Playwright, CodeceptJS and Webdriver Bidi.

Talk on data types and how PHP works with them at the core level with use cases for more efficient utilization.

The story of how we refused third-party DevOps services and took over all services ourselves. In the process, we made a complete revision of the infrastructure, added new monitoring and profiling tools on production. Action algorithms were built based on tools: Graylog, Grafana, influxDB, Pyroscope, Prometheus. As a result, the utilization of resources decreased by two times, and responses to key APIs were accelerated. During the talk, I'll cover what problems we found, how exactly we improved the metrics, and how we got to swoole.