SymfonyCon 2025: My First International Workshop Experience

Intro

Oh wow — it’s already over, but I’m still riding the emotions from this conference. That’s why I’m here, writing this article for you. I hope you can learn something from my experience and maybe you’ll soon find yourself as speaker/trainer at your very first conference — either in your country or abroad 🙂

I’ve been a public speaker since 2023, and ever since then I’ve been applying to multiple conferences. I’ve spoken at events across Poland, sharing my experience and ideas, but for a long time I couldn’t quite make it happen abroad… until SymfonyCon 2025! I’m truly happy it finally worked out 🔥

My speaker badge

In this article, I want to cover everything related to this trip, so treat it as a practical guide on how to apply, prepare, and perform on an international stage — especially if you’re thinking about submitting your own talk or workshop.

SymfonyCon is the flagship annual conference for the Symfony community — the main event for anyone building with Symfony in PHP. There’s only one SymfonyCon each year, but the ecosystem also includes local SymfonyDay and SymfonyLive conferences/meetups, as well as SymfonyOnline, the online-only conference.

I’ve decided to apply with multiple talks and one workshop, but only the workshop got selected – Refactoring towards Clean Architecture. In this workshop I teach how to refactor the application written in a framework way into Clean Architecture. You can find more (what it is about, outcomes, agenda, etc.) on the dedicated page.

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Symfony & PSR-16 Simple Cache

This week I was working on the integration with the Optimizely Feature Toggles.

Its PHP SDK is mediocre.

It makes the HTTP request for the data file whenever the new PHP process is executed.

The data file is in our case larger than 2 MB, so it has to download a large file, but also validate it and parse it.

That makes around 700 ms overhead on each process.

Therefore I needed a cache mechanism.

But, as we try to write the software in a framework-agnostic way, I wanted to use the industry standard interface – the PSR-16 Simple Cache, to not be coupled to a specific cache implementation.

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