Last tuesday I finally made it to the PHP Usergroup in Düsseldorf. @andygrunwald invited me quite a few times to participate, so I was very happy to finally follow the invitation.
If you also want to participate or find out more about the group, you can check out the meetup.com page:
The event on Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/PHP-Usergroup-Duesseldorf/events/198343282/
The group on Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/PHP-Usergroup-Duesseldorf
I tried to summarize my impression of both talks and maybe you can take something away from that. So enjoy 😉
SQL – Stiefmütterliche SQL-Indizierung
by @markuswinand / http://use-the-index-luke.com
Insights
- Not many developers know how indexing really works.
- Index and Query must match. As a developer we can either change the Index or the Query. We should do it.
- We should know how to read execution plans (e.g. via EXPLAIN)
- We should design our indexes and not just add them. Therefore we should know about every Query that exists so we can optimize for multiple Queries at once.
My takeaway
- We should all read Markus’s stuff on his website, buy the book or hire him as a consultant. Although I have read some of his writings beforehand, he really knows how to present it to a crowd. And I like the austrian accent (my mother in law is austrian, too) 🙂
Reverse Engineering von Pfandbons
Insights
- The human brain is very good for recognizing patterns in small to medium
- You can print money with Pfandbon Barcode manipulation
My takeaway
- Very interesting to see the scientific method applied to real life situations, seems very useful
- Software systems in all scenarios DO HAVE security problems
- You can gain a lot of knowledge about black box systems by observing the input and output
- Big companies are not very responsive to constructive criticism :/