About us
Welcome to PHP Thames Valley – a user group for PHP developers of all levels, from beginners to seasoned professionals.
PHP Thames Valley is the result of the exciting merger between the PHP Oxford and PHP Berkshire user groups, combining two brilliant communities to form a larger, stronger group. By bringing together PHP enthusiasts from across the Thames Valley, we aim to create an even more enriching environment for learning, sharing knowledge, and networking.
We meet monthly, alternating between Oxford and Reading, and each event features talks from experienced developers, exploring a wide range of topics related to PHP and the broader web development ecosystem.
Whether you're a seasoned expert in Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, Drupal, Zend, CakePHP, or any other PHP framework - or just starting your PHP journey - you’ll find something of value at our meetups.
Our events offer opportunities to learn from inspiring speakers, engage in discussions, and connect with other developers. We also welcome social meet-ups and informal networking, where you can exchange ideas and grow your professional network.
Join us at PHP Thames Valley to stay up-to-date with the latest in PHP development, gain fresh insights, and be part of a supportive, growing community.
Upcoming events
1
June Talks @ Reading: Christopher Miller & James Seconde
Thirsty Bear, 110 King's Road Reading RG1 3BY, Reading, GBWe're excited to be back in Reading!
After skipping our Oxford event in April, it's great to return to The Thirsty Bear — PHP Berkshire's old home — who've kindly welcomed us back and generously supporting our meetup.
And yes, there’ll be FREE pizza 🍕 thanks to this month's sponsor, Meet with Tech , a new platform for events and communities launching this June.
The venue is about a 12-minute walk from Reading station. We'll be on the first floor — the stairs are next to the bar on the left as you come in.
Arrive early to grab a slice, hang out, and meet fellow developers before the talks kick off, and feel free to stay afterwards for more networking.
Drinks can be purchased individually at the upstairs bar, which will be open for us throughout the evening.
We've got two talks lined up, and the first is already live on the page.
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1️⃣ Event Source Your Way Out Of Trouble by Christopher Miller
The talk explores the "Big Ball of Mud" scenario common in aging PHP applications, where side effects and buried state changes make debugging a nightmare. By introducing Event Sourcing, we move away from traditional CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) where the "why" and "how" of data changes are lost. Instead of just storing the current state in a database, we capture every business action as an immutable event. This creates a "Source of Truth" that allows developers to reconstruct the exact state of the system at any point in time, making it significantly easier to identify exactly where a legacy process went off the rails without digging through cryptic logs or messy if/else chains.
Once the root cause is identified, Event Sourcing provides a unique safety net for fixing problems. Rather than performing risky, manual SQL "hotfixes" on live data, we can leverage the Event Store to replay history and project it into new, corrected read models. This approach allows us to fix logic errors retrospectively, "time travel" through the application's history to verify the fix, and deploy with the confidence that our data integrity remains intact. The session focuses on practical strategies for incrementally strangling legacy PHP codebases, turning unpredictable bugs into repeatable, solvable sequences of events.
About the speaker: Christopher is a Software Engineer for MMS Marketing. He teaches people from the ground up how to be a developer. He is often found preparing his next talk, learning about the next new technology that might improve the applications, ensuring that tests are running at optimum levels or mentoring newcomers to the technology scene.
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2️⃣ I'm Watching You by James Seconde
Like all technology stacks, what cloud-based Application Monitoring tool depends on the choices of a lead architect or a CTO. Luckily for me (and for you!) Laravel Nightwatch has burst onto the scene. In this talk, we're going to dig deeper into it, with a healthy dose of wacky antics in the process.
About the speaker: A trained actor with a curious background: from Theatre Studies, to Q/A, to Business Intelligence development, to full stack web development, James is the resident specialist PHP Developer Advocate at Global Cloud Communications giant Vonage. He founded Birmingham, UK's current PHP usergroup BrumPHP, hosted the Fusion Meetup Series, and organised the TechMids Developer Conference.
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A big thank to our community sponsor Humand Talent for supporting the Oxfordshire and Berkshire PHP communities.
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Planned schedule of the evening:
- 18:30 – Arrival
- 18:45 – Talk #1
- 19:30 – Talk #2
- 20:30 – End of the event
8 attendees
Past events
73
