Hugh Williams, the vice president of experience, search and platforms at eBay, will take us on a tour of key platforms used at eBay. From their Hadoop platform and data stores, to how PHP is used at eBay. Finally, giving us some exciting insight to what's coming up that is cool at eBay in 2012.

An exciting debate on "SQL vs NoSQL".

ElasticSearch is the new kid on the search block. Built on top of Lucene and adhering to the best concepts of so-called NoSQL movement, ElasticSearch is a distributed, highly available, fast RESTful search engine, ready to be plugged into Web applications. Come to this session and learn how to set up, index, search, and tune ElasticSearch in less time than it takes to order a latte (disclaimer: at sufficiently busy central Starbucks locations. Side effects may include euphoria, stuff getting done, and extra time to spend with girlfriend).

Agile methodologies and processes have changed how PHP-based software projects are realized. This session gives an overview on how agility and quality can go hand-in-hand helping to deliver software on time and in budget. Agility does not stop at software development, though, but extends into other realms such as web operations. The audience will learn about some of the core ideas of DevOps, such as 'Dark Launches', 'Feature Flags' or 'Gradual Ramps' that help with implementing continuous deployment strategies.

The role of data science is becoming more prominent as the big data web emerges. This talk introduces the role of the data scientist and how data mining techniques are being applied, some using PHP. We are not talking application data but about creating new “... value from the data itself, … it’s a data product.” to quote the, O'Reilly Radar Report: What is Data Science?

Data touches everything. Understanding it all is the biggest problem out there to solve. Data crosses all industries, all parts of a business and all that makes up life. The future web is about finding answers, discoveries, stitching together sources, busting data silos to release the next level of collective wisdom for society.

This talk will set the scene of the big data web, share Data Scientist case studies and take a hands on look at text data mining code.

When we have an idea, it's tempting to dive headfirst into coding it and making it real. This is a great skill set that we have, but it can potentially harm our dream of building a great web site or a cool app; it is very easy to solve the wrong problem. Worse still, you might not find out that you've built an impractical solution until after you have invested a lot of time and passion into an idea doomed to fail.

In this session, we will explore how we can get closer to the problem we ought to solve, and get a better idea who our potential customers or users might be. We will look at some user experience design (UX) tools and activities that help us refine objectives, pave the way for making decisions, and determine the shape of a minimum viable product—before we need to write a single line of code.

As programmers we create the most fantastic systems and constructions out of nothing, and there are endless possibilities in achieving this. Yet we are still confided by the structure and rules of the language we use, which makes programming an exciting profession to be in: in the cross fire of creativeness and boundaries. Our most important tool, no, not Vim, but the brain, can handle this perfectly well. Unfortunately, and much like the rest of the world, there is a clear focus on logic, rationality, and knowledge of the parts. An expert coder is also intuitive, creative, and remembers to include the whole picture.

This talk covers the creative process, our dual CPU-brain and the cognitive skills needed for successful programming. As an added bonus we will also investigate why doing nothing does not mean you are not working.

Most developers choose a single cloud solution when choosing a production platform. Nowadays The Hybrid Cloud is the best way to go: combining a stable hosting solution with distributed and burstable unmanaged Cloud platforms.

This talk will combine standard server hosting with cloud platforms such as Azure and AWS for computing, storage & CDN. Besides the technical aspect, there will be a strong focus on best practices from an infrastructure point of view.

PHP is at the same time one of the easiest web programming languages to learn and also one of the most powerful and trusted technologies for running some of the world's largest sites. This talk discusses many of the tools and techniques that make PHP suitable for large scale enterprise sites, and many of the lessons we learned over a decade of building them.

In a world of single page applications, touchable and swipable interfaces, canvas, browser-based storage and geolocation APIs, the humble PHP developer might be forgiven for thinking that their JavaScript colleagues are stealing all the glory. And, er, you'd be right. But getting the most from the browser means being smarter about what you do server-side, too.

This talk explores a number of different approaches to designing your web application's back end to make it easier to build awesome browser based applications.

The MapReduce framework promises to make computing of large sets of data very easy. The approach offers excellent scalability across many computing nodes, and can easily be integrated with existing systems. This session will give an introduction to the basic techniques and ideas behind MapReduce, followed by hands-on examples using Apache Hadoop, a major implementation of MapReduce, and Hadoop's streaming functionality that allows users to write processing jobs not just in Java, but in any programming language, including PHP.

At the BBC we are preparing for the some big events in the coming year (the Olympics amongst them), as we don't have to cash to splash on new hardware in the current economic climate and our frozen license fee.

The BBC runs approximate 300 websites all contained with bbc.co.uk and running on the same hardware. This means that a spike in traffic on /weather affects /iplayer and all other sites hosted on our platform.

This talk will show some of the things we've been doing to benchmark our platform (the PHP, ZF portion anyway) and highlight poor performing sections of our site and address them.

I will explain some of the tools we've written and technologies we've used to achieve this on a relatively short timescale with limited budget.

This will cover our experience of using XHProf for the first time and augmenting Zend Framework to generate HAR (Http Archive) format files to expose the service calls our platform makes and how we’ve approached optimising them.

NoSQL databases get a lot of press coverage, but there seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding them, as in which situations they work better than a Relational Database, and how to choose one over another. This talk will give an overview of the NoSQL landscape and a classification for the different architectural categories, clarifying the base concepts and the terminology, and will provide a comparison of the features, the strengths and the drawbacks of the most popular projects (CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, Redis, Membase, Neo4j, Cassandra, HBase, Hypertable).

This talk will look at strategies to improve the performance of a Zend Framework 1 application. We'll start with measuring the performance and then provide some ideas on how to improve the performance.

Starting with, class loading, we'll then walk through Zend_Db's performance and then cast our eyes over the view to improve performance there. We'll then take a look at other potential bottlenecks in typical Zend Framework code and consider how what you need to do to improve your application's performance.