Larry Garfield
Speaker Bio
Larry Garfield has been building websites since he was a sophomore in high school, which is longer ago than he'd like to admit. Larry was an active Drupal contributor and consultant for over a decade, and led the Drupal 8 Web Services initiative that helped transform Drupal into a modern PHP platform.
Larry is Director of Developer Experience at Platform.sh, a leading continuous deployment cloud hosting company. He is also a member of the PHP-FIG Core Committee.
Larry holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from DePaul University. He blogs at both platform.sh/ and www.garfieldtech.com.
Building a cloud-friendly application
Mid-level, DevOps
The days of hand-crafted artisanal servers are long over. Modern web applications need to be able to run on many different servers without code changes. Not just different hosting providers, but different environments on the same hosting provider. Whether you're using a legacy dev/stage/prod setup or a modern branch-is-environment host, modern hosting imposes some requirements on your application design but also offers a huge potential for new and powerful tools.
In this session, we'll explore some key guidelines for building a cloud-friendly application, as well as look at some architectural options that a modern hosting platform enables.
Free Software: It's not about the license
Keynote
Free Software. Open Source. Software Freedom. Free as in Speech or Free as in Beer?
We're all familiar with the buzzwords, the catchphrases, and slogans. We all know the "GPL vs BSD" debate, and have probably participate in it at some point. But what do they mean, really? Is Open Source really just a friendlier name for Free Software, or is there something more to it?
Yes. Yes there is. Free Software, at its core, is a philosophical, cultural, and political movement. It is a part of, and inspiration for, the Free Culture movement. A movement born of a simple belief: That you should have control of your own digital destiny, and that it is immoral to deprive people of that right.
Let's try to recollect where our community came from, and the principles upon which it was founded.