Talks - 'PHP: Pretty Horrible Programs' & 'How does COBOL compare with PHP?'

Agenda:
18:30 - Arrival, refreshments and networking
18:50 - Introductions from Humand Talent and Global Initiative
19:00 - Talk #1 from Gina Peter Banyard
19:30 - Break
20:00 - Talk #2 from Andy Burgess
20:30 - Close

Talk #1 from Gina - PHP: Pretty Horrible Programs

PHP might be your go-to programming language at work; but do you truly know PHP?

In this fun talk, we will deep dive into some of PHP's quirks, incomprehensible behaviours, and things that you can technically do but really shouldn't.

Gina Banyard is a PHP core developer funded by The PHP Foundation, an organisation with the mission is to support, advance, and develop the PHP language.

She maintains the PHP documentations and formerly maintained the French translation.

Her main areas of interest within PHP are improving semantics and the type system.

In her free time, she likes photography, playing puzzle games and Richii Mahjong.

Talk #2 from Andy - How does the ancient language COBOL compare with our PHP?

Andy's first professional jobs used COBOL in directory publishing and using mainframe-based MRP (Materials Requirement Planning) manufacturing system - in the coal mining industry. He’s even worked as a "COBOL expert” for a job that never started properly - in Switzerland!

Andy has worked his way “down” in size from mainframe and minicomputers using COBOL (and a tiny bit of ALGOL) through Windows Development with "Microsoft Visual" suites to Web Development in PHP and Javascript.

He's worked in many different industries and on many different Operating Systems.

This event is organised by Humand Talent, and kindly hosted by sponsors Global Initiative at their Oxford offices.