Conference Talks
I've spoken at conferences across the PHP, DevOps, and security ecosystems. Here's a selection of recent and notable talks.
Asynchronous Awesome — Task Management in PHP
Our use of PHP sometimes grows beyond the request/response cycle. Image processing, video rendering, push notifications — any of these can take longer than a page request allows. This talk explores message queues, daemonized workers, event loops, and Promise-driven operations that break PHP out of its single-thread reputation. Every attendee left armed with new ways to think about large data jobs and the tools to make them work.
Maintaining Operational Sanity Across 100+ AWS Accounts
At a multinational vacation rental company, AWS accounts served as the unit of isolation for distinct applications and services. Managing accounts at this scale requires strong DevOps practices for security, operational sanity, and uniform observability. This talk covered the benefits of a multi-account strategy, the practices that make it possible, and the critical role observability tooling plays at scale.
WordPress, Meet AI
With advances in machine learning, AI integrations are now accessible to every developer. This talk demonstrated how to build intelligent features into WordPress using commonly available tools — no PhD or linear algebra required. Attendees got hands-on with tools like AWS Rekognition and walked away with practical integration patterns.
Web Application Security Update: Top Vulnerabilities
The OWASP Top Ten is the canonical list of web application security risks. This session examined each item from a PHP perspective — demonstrating what can go wrong, how attacks work in practice, and concrete strategies to prevent them in production applications.
Password-Based Authentication Strategies
Authentication from first principles. This talk started with password-based systems and went deep into defensive hashing techniques, edge cases around protecting user data, and the secure remote password (SRP) protocol — demonstrated in both native PHP and a JavaScript client implementation.
The Future of the Web is Low-Tech
Not everyone has high-speed internet, 3G/4G connectivity, or traditional desktop tools. This session explored use cases, user groups, and techniques for making content and publishing tools accessible to those with limited connectivity — along with the emerging (and sometimes controversial) technologies that make it possible.