He is the second Flowstar to make an appearance at the event, after Danny Kopping joined the line-up at the inaugural event in Cape Town last year.
PHP is a programming language widely used across the web, and with South Africa’s Internet penetration on the rise, it’s great to see these kind of events happening here more frequently.
“PHP is the biggest language online, even though a lot of people don’t even notice it. Things like WordPress are developed in PHP, which powers almost 70% of the websites on the Internet.
“Facebook and Twitter both started with PHP. Even though Twitter decided to move away for some misguided reasons, Facebook is still a very powerful contributor to PHP,” says Zander.
“Someone once said that ‘the best technologies bubble to the top’, and PHP is a good technology because it is popular. It is a very forgiving language due to its loose typing, but it is immensely powerful and due to its open-source nature it grows based on what the community thinks it needs.”
It’s this community-based approach that also allows for local speakers to be part of the conference line-up, and Zander’s topic is “Writing Testable Applications”.
“I have noticed that very few developers in South Africa bother with tests, so you could say this is purely for selfish reasons, as I might have to work on one of their projects in the future.”
Zander also confesses that apart from being nervous about speaking in front of his peers, he is geeking out about the fact that the man who created the language with which he now makes a living, Rasmus Lerdorf, will also be coming to the conference.
If you’re interested in catching the conference, the first part will be held in Johannesburg on 4 and 5 April, before moving down to Cape Town for a series of workshops on 12 April. Visit the website here: www.phpsouthafrica.com.