We are the makers of the new everyday things. We design and develop the virtual pens, telephones, newspapers, calendars, and door-handles that people interact with every single day. We are the virtual architects and the products that we design and develop have the power to determine whether people have a good day or a bad day.

In this session, Aral Balkan will outline the important role that user experience design plays in the making of virtual products and inspire you to see that it is your job – regardless of whether you make web sites, mobile apps, intranet systems, or ticket machines – to make this new world that we are crafting together not only usable and accessible but beautiful, fun, inspiring, pleasurable, delightful, and – dare I say – magical.

                          

Test-driven development is generally regarded as a good move: it should result in simple decoupled design, your tests tend to cover behaviour not methods, and far fewer bugs. However, just getting unit tests in on a real, commercial project is hard - switching to TDD is even harder. Defining concrete answers to a problem is hard and can be difficult to integrate into Often you can start a project with good intentions and coverage, then the deadline looms and the tests go out then the hacks come in. So, instead of beating ourselves up about not being perfect let's look at an interactive approach to adopting TDD principles. We'll look at tactics for selling TDD to your client, boss and colleagues. This talk will also cover methods for making TDD easier for you by showing you what tools you can use to integrate it into your development environment. In the project itself, we'll examine how we can make small but permanent steps towards full TDD, without losing that progress when deadlines hit. We'll also cover a few methods for learning on your own time and how the whole process can actually be made quite enjoyable.

You can find Rowan's slides on slideshare.

                          

Even bad code can function. But if code isn't clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn't have to be that way. In this session you will learn how you can offset your technical debt with clean code that is readable and testable as well as reusable.

                          

With Twitter moving its API to OAuth the idea of using tokens rather than passwords for authentication went mainstream. Many explanations of OAuth make it seem complicated whereas in reality the "OAuth Dance" is a series of simple steps executed in sequence. This talk covers consuming and providing OAuth services, includes implementation examples, and is recommended for all technical leads, architects, and integration specialists.

You can find Lorna's slides at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/oauth-7990565

                          

You already know Singleton, Signal/Observer, Factory and friends. But, which object oriented patterns are en vogue in the PHP world and how can you seize their power? This talk gives you an overview on Dependency Injection, Data Mapper and more OO patterns the PHP world talks about right know, using practical code examples.

You can find Toby's slides under "Advanced OOP Patterns" here: http://qafoo.com/presentations.html

                          

The web is full of useful advice focussed on pushing out the last bit of performance of your code. They mention trivial changes. like changing every occurrence of print with echo even suggesting to use for instead of foreach. These optimisations help, but you are not going to notice it unless they're in a tight loop with many iterations. It is also a wrong approach for tackling performance issues. Before you can optimise, you need to find out if your codeis actually slow; then you need to *understand* the code; and *then* you need to find out where you can optimise it. This talk introduces tools and concepts to optimise the optimisation of your PHP applications.

You can find Derick's talk slides over on his site [PDF]

                          

CouchDB is a prominent representative of the NoSQL movement. Using its integrated web server and eventual consistent replication you can not only distribute data, but also full application code. This even works for clients which are not always connected to the internet, like e.g. mobile devices. This session gives you an insight Couch apps, their beauty and pitfalls.

You can find Kore's slides over on http://talks.qafoo.com/

                          

This session starts with a brief but important overview about the growing Oracle technology eco-system. It shows what Oracle's direction means for PHP application development and deployment.

The majority of the talk then highlights techniques on building high performance PHP applications with the very widely used Oracle Database. Techniques include connection pooling, application monitoring, automatic data privacy for PHP application users, online application upgrades, caching for performance, and how to suspend and resume database transactions to effectively build stateful web applications.

You can find Chris' slides on oracle's technetwork

                          

With Google constantly pushing the customer expectations of searching, is it time to move away from our database full-text search in pursuit of a more targeted platform? Can implementing Solr offer more than an answer to a search? Implementing a search platform isn’t always suitable for all applications, but in this talk we’ll look at identifying the right search solution, choosing the best way to integrate it into our application and exploring all the benefits a search server can offer.

Edit: Paul's slides can be found at http://www.slideshare.net/paulmatthews86/search-with-solr

                          

Martin de Keijzer

Many people use Zend Framework for it's MVC implementation, but it has a lot of hidden gems. Internationalization (i18n) is one of them. We will look how you can create an application that will have the right languages, currencies, dates and times all based on the location of the visiting user. This session will take away a lot of headaches in international projects and will improve the quality in overall.

Edit: You can find Martin's slides on slideshare