Pragmatism in the real world

The Serverless ApplicationPresented at DevFest Cardiff, November 2019

Serverless platforms are suited to a wide range of applications from IoT & chatbots through to microservices and web hooks. In this session, I’ll introduce you to how serverless applications work and embrace cloud services to live in a world where there are many separate parts that make up the application. I'll cover the architectural patterns we use to design a serverless application including handling their stateless nature, how to use multiple functions for a task and leveraging event processing to trigger further functions. I will then turning my attention to showing you how to put these into practice by looking at how they can be implemented in an Lambda or Apache OpenWhisk.

By the end of the session, you'll understand how serverless applications work and you'll want to start building your own!

Capturing LightPresented at OggCamp, October 2019

A 25 minute introduction to photography's exposure triangle. We looked at aperture, shutter speed and ISO and discussed how they interact so that you can can take the photo that you see in your mind's eye.

Building with Slim 4Presented at BrumPHP, October 2019

With support for a host of PSR standards, Slim 4 is a PHP micro framework that enables you to write powerful web applications and APIs that embrace the wider PHP ecosystem and in this talk, I will show how. It takes advantage of many of the FIG group's PSR standards to allow easy interoperability with a large ecosystem of components. We will look at how Slim's middleware system leverages the PSR-15 middleware and request handlers to create easily understandable and flexible applications. We will cover application setup, routing and the relationship between actions and middleware. Dependency injection is very useful in a modern PHP application and we'll look at how to integrate any PSR-11 container with Slim ensuring you can decouple your dependencies. By the end of the session, you will be equipped to use the new Slim 4 to create web applications yourself.

The making of a great APIPresented at Dutch PHP Conference, June 2019

Everyone is writing APIs but what makes a great one? I will take you on a tour of the most important features that you should think about when creating an API. These ensure that your API plays well with HTTP and make your API a delight to maintain and work with. Give your API a competitive edge by making it great and developers will want to work with it.

Building Serverless PHP applicationsPresented at Dutch PHP Conference, June 2019

Serverless systems allow us to concentrate solely on our code and let the provider deal with infrastructure. In this tutorial we will build a serverless PHP application and deploy to the cloud. I'll cover how to design, build and deploy for serverless platforms, and how to use an API gateway to turn incoming HTTP requests into events that trigger those serverless functions.

Over the course of our time together, we'll build a small, complete serverless microservice that showcases the key features of a serverless application.By the end of the tutorial, you'll be well placed to design and build your own serverless applications that are more than mere curiosities.

Introduction to Serverless PHPPresented at PHP Shropshire, April 2019

APIs and microservices are how we build modern web applications and serverless technologies make this easy. This session will show you how serverless applications are built and how you can leverage your PHP skills to build APIs of all shapes and sizes. We will cover how to use your current knowledge to build applications in PHP within Apache OpenWhisk or AWS Lambda, leveraging the API Gateway to build robust APIs quickly and easily. By the end of the session, you'll be well placed to design and build your own microservices that take full advantage of the power of serverless technologies.

Introduction to Serverless PHPPresented at PHPSW, February 2019

APIs and microservices are how we build modern web applications and serverless technologies make this easy. This session will show you how serverless applications are built and how you can leverage your PHP skills to build APIs of all shapes and sizes. We will cover how to use your current knowledge to build applications in PHP within Apache OpenWhisk or AWS Lambda, leveraging the API Gateway to build robust APIs quickly and easily. By the end of the session, you'll be well placed to design and build your own microservices that take full advantage of the power of serverless technologies.

Introduction to Serverless PHPPresented at Sunshine PHP, Feb 2019

APIs and microservices are how we build modern web applications and serverless technologies make this easy. This session will show you how serverless applications are built and how you can leverage your PHP skills to build APIs of all shapes and sizes. We will cover how to use your current knowledge to build applications in PHP within Apache OpenWhisk or AWS Lambda, leveraging the API Gateway to build robust APIs quickly and easily. By the end of the session, you'll be well placed to design and build your own microservices that take full advantage of the power of serverless technologies.

Adventures in Apache OpenWhiskPresented at Serverless Days Cardiff, January 2019

Apache OpenWhisk is an Open Source serverless platform suited to a wide range of applications from IoT & chatbots through to microservices and web hooks. In this session, I’ll introduce OpenWhisk and show you how it works.

We’ll look at it’s key architectural concepts including actions, triggers, rules and packages which will show you how a serverless function integrates into a wide application. I’ll also look at the API Gateway functionality that makes building APIs that much easier. This session is recommended for tech leads and developers of all levels wanting to know about serverless and the OpenWhisk project.