Paul Conroy

This talk grew out of a side project that got wildly out of hand. I set out to build a quick Laravel app to make one of my favourite podcasts searchable - just a weekend hack, a bit of "vibe coding" to scratch an itch. Instead, it became EverythingIsShowbiz.com, a fully fledged PHP + AI transcript engine with semantic search. What started as an experiment turned into a practical crash course in where AI actually fits into PHP workflows: from managing GPU-heavy transcription jobs, to cleaning up potentially-libellous misheard phrases, making AI output trustworthy at scale, and all on a side project budget!Along the way, I learned a lot about the gap between AI hype and engineering reality. We'll explore the messy middle - where Laravel pipelines replace notebooks, admin tools become sanity savers, and side projects quietly teach us the same lessons as production systems. This talk is for anyone who's ever been asked, "can you do that... but add AI in?" and wants to know what that really looks like in PHP.A small reminder that PHP still belongs in the future - even when that future comes wrapped in AI.

Everything Is Showbiz: Lessons from a PHP + AI Side Projectd

The ever-evolving landscape of web development often places frontend and backend developers in two separate camps. However, backend developers are increasingly faced with the task of improving the speed of underperforming websites. With page speed and good user experience key factors in the success of modern websites, anything which slows down page loads is bad for business. The good news is that enhancing website speed is not solely the domain of frontend developers!

This talk focuses on easy-to-implement 'quick wins' that can significantly boost website speed from the backend. These tactics don't require an extensive understanding of frontend frameworks or languages. With simple code changes and optimisations, backend developers can dramatically improve frontend speed and user experience, without getting bogged down in node version mismatches, build process failures, or any of the other usual frontend bogeymen!

The key areas covered will include:
- Faster Font Loading: Custom fonts are a key part of modern website design, but heavy font weights can hurt page performance. We'll cover a combination of loading techniques and ways to effectively shrink the file sizes right down.
- Smoother Image Presentation: We'll go over the 'dos and don'ts' of effective lazy loading, using responsive images, and optimising image formats for faster rendering.
- Efficient Video Integrations: Youtube embeds are increasingly common, but can add a lot of weight to a page load. We'll explore ways to have lightweight video embeds, getting the benefits of video without slowing down your site!
- Minimising the impact of ads on your page speed score: Ads are often a necessary evil on sites - evil compounded when their typical loading pattern hurts our page speed scores! We'll go through practical examples to minimise the impact of your ad stack on your page load times.
- Measuring the impact of our changes: How do we know that our changes have had a positive impact?

This is a practical talk, which will feature real-world examples and code samples to demonstrate how these techniques can be easily implemented. Attendees will leave with actionable insights that can be applied immediately to optimise their websites.

Paul Conroy

Paul Conroy

Square1 Solutions