ConFoo 2026

Monday, 02 March 2026

Last week, I was in Montreal for the ConFoo conference, where I gave two talks, one about Rust and one about PHP. I also attended plenty of fascinating talks given by others, and absorbed some new ideas along the way.

Pre-conference activities

Monday

Though the conference started on Wednesday, I flew to Montreal on Monday to ensure that, if there were delays with my flights or baggage, things would (hopefully) be sorted out before the conference began. On both of my flights, I practiced my Rust talk to be sure that I had the timing nailed down and knew what I was going to say. Also on both flights, flight attendants stopped to tell me that talking on the phone was not allowed - I was rehearsing out loud and looked like I was talking to someone else.

Tuesday

While the conference officially started on Wednesday, there were two days of workshops held beforehand. I wasn't registered for the workshops, but was able to pick up my attendee badge, saving me from longer lines on Wednesday.

During the day on Tuesday, I also spent some time packaging PHP 8.5.4RC1 and finalizing my talks, before attending the opening party Tuesday evening.

Conference days

Wednesday

Wednesday kicked off with an opening session from the conference organizers, followed by a keynote about AI development using specifications. There were then six rounds of talks, including my own first talk, "Intro to Rust for Experienced Developers," in the afternoon. I'll discuss how that talk went later.

With 10 different talks during each session, it was hard to choose which talks to attend; the only easy decision was to attend the talk I was giving rather than skipping it to listen to someone else. I'm glad that the talks were being recorded - hopefully I'll be able to go back and watch the talks I was unable to attend in person.

I'm not going to list every single talk I went to, but I do want to call out "I didn’t know HTML & CSS could do THAT!" from Kathryn Grayson Nanz. I plan to try and incorporate some of the features I learned about into my website when I have a chance.

After the talks on Wednesday, there was a conference happy hour that was open to the public (including non-conference attendees). Among the people I met was Pierrick Charron, who has been serving as the "veteran" release manager for PHP 8.5 and who trained me on the release process. We had met virtually, but it was nice to put a face to the name.

I also met two other release managers who were attending the conference, Calvin Buckley, who is a PHP 8.4 release manager, and Derick Rethans, who had been a release manager for PHP 7.4. I've interacted with them both on Slack and GitHub, but it was to meet them in person.

Thursday

The second day of the conference had seven rounds of talks rather than six, since there was no opening keynote. I learned a lot from a number of amazing speakers, though nothing that I'm planning to incorporate into own website immediately. Still, I'm sure my approaches to writing tests and using regular expressions are probably going to be influenced by what I learned.

In the afternoon I have my second talk, "PHP 8.5: New Features from the Source," which is discussed in more detail lower down.

The last round of talks was followed by "ConFoo cocktail," again open to the public. In addition to enjoying the company and getting to know my fellow attendees, I also got some "work" done: announcing PHP 8.5.4RC1, and designing a friendship system for PHP in collaboration with Dave Liddament and Derick. I'll write up a separate blog post about that work when I have a chance.

Friday

Friday was the last day of the conference. Having already given both of my talks, I didn't have anything to stress about and was able to devote more attention to the talks. Among other topics, I enjoyed learning about FrankenPHP, Xdebug, and ideas from functional languages. After the last round of normal talks, we heard an amazing keynote, "Seven Habits of a (Mostly) Successful Team" from Sander Hoogendoorn.

My talks

I was invited to give two talks at ConFoo, one about Rust that I had never given before, and the second being a summary of the changes in PHP 8.5, which I had discussed previously.

Intro to Rust

The first talk I gave, on Wednesday afternoon, was "Intro to Rust for Experienced Developers." The premise was that developers already comfortable with programming ideas (variables, functions, types, etc.) might want to add Rust to their repertoire. Though I discussed a number of other programming languages, the primary comparisons were between Rust and C, C++, JavaScript, PHP, and Python, all of which I have used extensively in recent years.

ConFoo was the first time I presented this talk, and the feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive. I had the timing nailed perfectly and was able to discuss everything I had planned and have a few minutes left for questions at the end. I plan to submit a similar talk to future conferences, though obviously with improvements as I continue to learn Rust.

The slides that are used are available here on my site. Note that the links to documentation, books, and references are specific to Rust 1.93.1 (the latest release so far); these will become outdated as Rust continues to evolve.

PHP 8.5

The second talk I gave, on Thursday afternoon, was about the new features in PHP 8.5. I had given a version of this talk twice previously, at Longhorn PHP in October and online via MergePHP in November.

As I mentioned in my blog post about MergePHP, there were more changes in PHP 8.5 than could be comfortably discussed in the time allotted for each session at ConFoo. In addition to the removals discussed in that blog post, in the days leading up to ConFoo I dropped a few additional slides about the changed Directory class, the deprecation of the RFC7231 date format, and the deprecation of a few INI options. I also added a slide for introducing myself, and a summary at the end.

Additionally, I updated the order so that the fastest slides would be the last ones, in case I ran out of time. Thankfully, I did not need to speed through anything. The updated slides are also available on my site.

Future steps

I do not anticipate giving another talk about PHP 8.5 - we are already well into the PHP 8.6 development cycle, and in fact, I'll be talking about the PHP 8.6 features in May at PHPTek. I will, however, apply the feedback that I got on the PHP 8.5 talk when developing the PHP 8.6 version.

For the Rust talk, I have no immediate changes to make now, but something I may do if and when the talk is accepted for another conference is adjust the list of programming languages that I compare Rust to. After I gave the talk, one of the attendees suggested I consider adding Java and C# to the comparisons - I have some experience with both, though not as much. I'll need to refresh my familiarity with those languages before I feel confident adding them to the talk.

I very much enjoyed attending ConFoo this year, and plan to submit talks again for next year. Let's hope they invite me back!