Dutch PHP Conference 2026: Notes from a Cinema Full of PHP Developers

That's a wrap on Dutch PHP Conference for 2026!

This was my second time speaking at the event, and it's quickly become one of my favourite conferences on the calendar. The talks are strong, the organisation is excellent, and the atmosphere strikes that rare balance between deeply technical sessions and broader conversations about where our industry is going.

Four Conferences, One Community

One of the things that makes the event particularly interesting is that it runs alongside Dutch AI Conference, WebDevCon, and AppDevCon.

That combination creates a much more varied crowd than a typical single-track developer conference. You end up wandering into sessions you might never have chosen yourself, and chatting with attendees coming from completely different disciplines.

Those accidental discoveries - the sessions you didn't plan to attend, the conversations you didn't expect to have - are often where the most interesting ideas come from.

Speaking in a Cinema

My talk this year was Modern PHP Features You're Probably Not Using (But Should Be).

The venue for the talk was a cinema-style theatre with a huge screen, which made for a great speaking environment. There's something quite satisfying about seeing code samples projected on a screen that size.

It did, however, trigger memories from a previous life managing a cinema. On one particularly memorable occasion I had to stand in front of a packed Lord of the Rings opening night screening to explain to a room of people dressed as elves and orcs that the film had broken down halfway through and everyone had to go home. Thankfully the mood at the end of my talk was considerably more positive than that evening. I had the lucky slot of just after the opening keynote, so had a decent crowd in the room, which always helps with the energy in the room!

Audience Interaction

It's enormously gratifying as a speaker when your talk causes some kind of reaction. People coming up with questions after the talk, or stopping you in the hallway to tell you what they thought - it's a great feeling to know that your talk had some kind of impact. At this conference, I was lucky enough to have Jeroen Heijmans in one of my talks. Jeroen sketched out his notes for each of the talks he attended. I was blown away by the creativity here. There are definitely a number of ideas he had here which I wish I had thought of! Not least explaining PHP pipes through the medium of Super Mario-style pipes - an idea that may just make it into the next version of this talk!

Standout Talks

As always, one of the challenges of a conference like this is that there are simply more interesting talks than you can physically attend.

A few that stood out for me:

• Johan Janssens opened with a fun keynote that mixed web and PHP history with some fascinating WebAssembly demonstrations. It was a great reminder of how much the ecosystem has evolved, and how much experimentation is happening at the edges of it.

• Liam Hammett delivered a fantastic session titled 101 Tips for Any Laravel Application. My notebook was overflowing by the end of this one. It was packed with the kind of practical tips that make you think "I didn't know I could do that."

• Mike Lehan demonstrated migrating high-traffic PHP endpoints to Rust-based serverless environments. Mike has a knack for explaining deep technical ideas in a very approachable way, leaving me with the (possibly ill-founded!) confidence that I could go and try this myself.

• Alexandre Daubois showed how to write a PHP extension using FrankenPHP and Go, without touching C. Alex's talks are always great value for "I must go home and try this immediately" ideas, and this one was no exception.

• Max Snow shared some excellent practical advice on designing analytics-friendly data structures, and the importance of getting your schema right sooner rather than later.

• And Derick Rethans closed the conference with a thought-provoking keynote on owning your own data. The talk combined history, practical demonstrations using ActivityPub, and a broader look at the Fediverse - making it both timely and thought-provoking.

All great talks, and worth keeping an eye out for when the conference videos get published.

The Hallway Track

Of course, conferences aren't just about scheduled talks. The hallway track was great fun this year: lots of interesting conversations, some fun demos and games from exhibitors, and the simple joy of catching up with people you only usually see online.

One particularly entertaining moment was watching Dave Liddament experience pure, unfiltered delight at making a new robotic friend on the exhibition floor.

Conference Serendipity

One of the best examples of conference serendipity happened during my own talk. While I was discussing more recent PHP features, Mike Lehan had an idea for a PHPStan rule related to named arguments.

Six hours later at the evening social, he had a laptop open while the PHPStan creator himself, Ondřej Mirtes, walked Mike through the specifics of implementing it. That kind of spontaneous collaboration is a great reminder of why in-person events still matter!

In-person events also have a great social aspect. Mike Lehan and I continued our tradition of getting out for a short run on the (thankfully!) fairly flat Amsterdam turf. Not a huge amount of other folks interested in a run in the rain at 7am, funnily enough!

Already Looking Forward to Next Year

One reliable sign of a great conference is how many talks you didn't get to attend because there was so much good stuff happening at the same time.

I'm already looking forward to the recordings being published so I can catch up on the sessions I missed. Huge credit to Ivo Jansch, Toni Van de Voorde, and the entire organising team behind the event. It's a fantastic conference with a great mix of deep technical content and big-picture thinking.

Roll on 2027!