The annual CakeFest conference is upon us again. A lot of people are excited about the various talks that are lined up. You can find the schedule on the CakeFest website, where all the talks are listed.

In today's article, I'll recap all the talks that happened and the announcements coming out of CakeFest 2017.

Larry Masters opened the conference with his keynote.

Larry announced CakePHP's support for @OSMIhelp and talked about the CakePHP elePHPants that would be available soon for PHP developers to buy. Developers can now buy CakePHP swag from the Official CakePHP Swag Shop.

Jose Rodriguez - Core Contributor to CakePHP talked about 10 Ways to improve. Check out his session:

Legendary Ed Finkler talked about Mental Health in the Developer Community. He spoke against encouraging workaholism. He talked about health issues in the work place and encouraged companies to help their employees maintain work life balance. The healthier an employee, the greater the value he or she brings to the company. You can check out his OSMI project and contribute to the cause.

You can listen to his session below:

Stefan van Gastel - Technical Lead, Mobile Apps Military Police at Dutch Ministry of Defence talked about CakePHP in a containerized (CI/CD) environment. He spoke on the benefits of managing your apps in containers. He also gave a detailed breakdown of how it works at the Dutch Ministry of Defence.

You can listen to his session:

CakePHP in a containerized (CI/CD) environment - Stefan van Gastel https://t.co/JbbRWxyZsL — CakePHP (@cakephp) June 10, 2017

Prosper Otemuyiwa talked about Progressive Web Apps for CakePHP developers. Yeah, that's me. I spoke about how CakePHP developers can latch on to Progressive Web Apps technology to build web apps that behave like mobile apps and works well across many browsers. I encouraged the developers present at the conference to learn JavaScript and take advantage of its power.

You can check out my session here:

Progressive Web Apps For CakePHP Developers - Prosper Otemuyiwa @unicodeveloper https://t.co/JaZfBZMaQi — CakePHP (@cakephp) June 10, 2017

These are my slides.

Jeff Kolesnikowicz talked about Realtime PHP using Websockets. He explained the realtime architecture and showed a live demo about implementing realtime using websockets.

Check out his session here:

Ed Barnard: Ed has been a programmer for over three decades. He talked about CakePHP Prepared Statements Ease MySQL Table Design. In my opinion, this was the most technical session of the conference. He talked about optimizing MySQL, writing great queries, utilizing prepared statements, and general database design.

Check out his session here:

CakePHP Prepared Statements Ease MySQL Table Design - Ed Barnard @ewbarnard https://t.co/0N4YoGSOsJ — CakePHP (@cakephp) June 10, 2017

Jose Gonzalez: Jose is a CakePHP core contributor. He talked about Open Source Infrastructure. He informed the audience about how the opensourceCakePHP build process is set up, and how he automates everything in a way that newbies can get along really well.

Check out his session here:

Sharon Steed: Sharon gave a talk on Building powerful relationships by communicating with empathy. She's a stutterer and used herself as an example in many of the use cases she gave about relationships and community.

You can listen to her session here:

Cultivating community: Building powerful relationships by communicating with empathy - Sharon Steed @sharonsteed https://t.co/yvi8LwVA57 — CakePHP (@cakephp) June 10, 2017

Day 1 ended with some lightning talks.

Aside: Securing PHP Applications with Auth0

Are you building a product with PHP? We at Auth0, can help you focus on what matters the most to you, the special features of your product. Auth0 can help you make your product secure with state-of-the-art features like passwordless, breached password surveillance, and multifactor authentication.

We offer a generous free tier so you can get started with modern authentication.

Conclusion

Day 1 of CakeFest was awesome. The sessions were great and the attendees really connected well.

To conclude, if you are new to CakePHP, check out this excellent tutorial that introduces you to the framework and teaches you how to create your first app and add authentication to it.