Interview with 3 SensioLabs speakers at SymfonyLive Paris 2024

Three members of the SensioLabs technical team were speakers at SymfonyLive Paris 2024. Just back from the conference, they answered our questions about their experience. From their choice of topic to their preparation and impressions, read the exclusive interview with our speakers at SymfonyLive Paris 2024.

Imen Ezzine: Hello, ever since I joined SensioLabs, I have been wanting to give a talk at SymfonyLive Paris. This year, I decided that it is the perfect time to share a topic I’m passionate about: testing external APIs in projects. With the rise of applications that consume multiple external APIs, I feel it’s essential to present this library (PHP-VCR) that I consider to be magical and that makes developers’ lives so much easier.

Imen: It was my very first public talk. Fortunately, I was able to practice a bit earlier by presenting my topic at an internal Midi formation with the SensioLabs team. I also had the benefit of feedback from Salah Meharga, our CTO, and Nicolas Grekas on the slides.

Imen: I was much more confident that day: I rehearsed like 1,000 times before I went on stage. I was a little stressed for the first 5 minutes because I had a problem with the remote control and there were a lot of people in the room. After a few minutes, I finally let go and I knew the material well, which helped. I felt like I was on a cloud. It was a very good experience, and I’d like to have that feeling again.

Simon Andre: I talked about the LIVE Component. We all, in the SymfonyCasts team, realized that it wasn’t very well known. I wanted to show a topic that people would like to see to whet their appetite.

Mathéo Daninos: My theme was more about Symfony UX and showing what we’re doing, what’s cool, what’s working and what people can use right now. It’s a topic that really touches me.
Back-end developers often tend to neglect the front-end, and I wanted to show them that they shouldn’t be afraid of it.

Simon: I think that back-end developers have been kept too far away from the front-end for a long time.

Matheo: Yes, I gave some concrete examples, Simon went into more detail.

Simon: Personally, it was a challenge, because I wasn’t able to give my talk at SymfonyCon Brussels. Basically, it was interesting to talk about these topics that aren’t talked about very much. And to put a smile on people’s faces. I prepared for weeks, but I still ended up rewriting a third of it the night before…

Mathéo: A month in advance, I had everything I wanted to say. I also had to prepare the workshop [Editor’s note: a pre-conference workshop on Symfony UX took place on March 26-27], which is more pressure, because you have to prepare 7 hours of content. I prepared the workshop first and took from it what I wanted to say in my talk. I think I was ready 2 weeks in advance.

Simon: I introduced the LIVE components, which are Symfony components that allow you to add interactivity in the easiest and most intuitive way possible for a Symfony developer, without knowing JavaScript. For example, they can be used to create widgets that make the page more dynamic. From the comfort of Symfony development, a back-end developer can participate in improving the user experience of his project.

We took the opportunity to present UX Icons, a component that has just been released. I was able to talk about it, and the audience responded well. UX Icons allows you to manage SVG icons in a web project by automatically downloading them.

Matheo: I talked about how to implement Symfony UX in a real project. I talked about Stimulus, Turbo and so on. I showed how to go from nothing to a native application. In fact, I did exactly that during my pre-conference workshop with the attendees. We did it in 7 hours!

Simon: Liberating! I was stressed before, but afterwards I felt a very empathetic audience, full of positive intentions, which gave me confidence. It took a while for my body to relax, but in my mind I loved it from the very first second. It was a great experience and I can’t wait to do it again!

Matheo: I felt like a third person outside of myself. I was afraid of being late and not being able to connect my computer, but once the talk started, I was very proud to present Symfony UX. This is my 5th time presenting Symfony UX to the community, so I’m getting the hang of it.

Many thanks to our three SymfonyLive Paris 2024 speakers for their feedback, and congratulations on their presentations! Check out our SymfonyLive Paris 2024 recap here.

You can watch a replay of all the conference talks by purchasing a ticket on the Symfony conferences website or with your conference ticket.