Recent Conference Talks

All of my talks, including slides and feedback ratings, can be found on Joind.in: https://joind.in/user/colinodell/talks

Hacking Your Way To Better Security

Lone Star PHP 2016

The goal of this talk is to educate developers on common security vulnerabilities, how they are exploited, and how to protect against them. We'll explore several of the OWASP Top 10 attack vectors like SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, session hijacking, and insecure direct object references. Each topic will be approached from the perspective of an attacker to see how these vulnerabilities are detected and exploited using several realistic examples.

league/commonmark Lightning Talk

Nomad PHP

league/commonmark is a well-written, super-configurable Markdown parser for PHP based on the CommonMark spec. In this lightning talk, we’ll introduce the CommonMark spec, discuss why it’s important, and demonstrate how the league/commonmark project can be used and extended for your own PHP projects.

Debugging Effectively

php[world] 2015

Software bugs are inevitable; some are especially difficult to track down, causing you to waste countless hours before throwing your hands up in defeat. It doesn't have to be this way! The mental fatigue and wasted time can be avoided by using strategies like identifying the most-appropriate tool, taking a logical & objective approach, challenging assumptions, listening to variables, isolating the code path, and reinforcing code with automated tests.

PHP 7 Crash Course

php[world] 2015

The PHP 7 release is just around the corner, bringing some much-desired changes and improvements to the language. However, many developers simply aren't aware of what's coming. We'll remedy this by checking out the new "spaceship operator," demonstrating how static type hints produce clean code, and using anonymous classes to quickly implement interfaces on the fly. Attendees will also learn about breaking changes and "gotchas" to watch out for when making the upgrade and will receive pointers on getting started with PHP 7 today.

Debugging Effectively

SymfonyLive San Francisco 2015

Software bugs are inevitable - it doesn't matter how experienced you are or how well you follow best-practices. Some bugs are especially difficult to track down, causing you to waste countless hours before throwing your hands up in defeat. It doesn't have to be this way though!