This month we have Mark Taylor (@willCodeForAle on twitter) Lead Architect at DealTrak, giving us a talk about all the different database types available to you as a PHP developer.

We also have Phil Sturgeon (@philsturgeon on twitter) Developer Relations at Stoplight and API guru, giving us a talk about how you can go design first for your APIs using Stoplight Studio and OpenAPI.

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Different Types of Database:

Description:

Often Developers will just go with a commonly used relational database as it’s what they’re already comfortable with, however a relational database can often not be the best tool for the job. My talk introduces you to the options available, which will help you to choose the best database type for your project’s requirements. Candidates will be Relational, Key Value Store, Document, Wide Column, Graph and Time Series databases

About Mark:

Over far to many years, Mark has done a mix of design, development (particularly PHP), DevOps, database administration and technical architecture. He currently works for DealTrak as their Lead Architect.

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Design first APIs using Stoplight Studio:

Description:

API Description Documents (a.k.a "specifications") can be used for all sorts of time and money saving things. At this point most developers are aware they can help with docs and have maybe played around with mocking, but they often have this concern about "keeping specs in sync with code".

This talk walks through using API description documents for client-side validation (avoid validation hell by telling your clients how they should handle validation), server-side validation in the application (stop writing complex validation logic in your ORM model or some other awkward place), and validation in the API gateway (don't even bother wasting application server resources with invalid requests).

Mostly talking about OpenAPI and JSON Schema, as they can do a whole lot more than Protobuf and GraphQL Types.

About Phil:

Phil is an API advocate and openapi advate, currently working for Stoplight helping them build awesome tools for API design and testing. When he isn't planting trees, riding his bike all over the world, or working on API specifications you can often find him writing a book or two.

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Join us on Slack, our online community: https://www.phpsouthwales.uk/slack

Thank you to our sponsors:

- Lexis Nexis
- Twilio
- Techire
- TYPO3

We *always* need more speakers! Volunteer to speak or request a topic: [masked] or #speaking in Slack