Rowan Merewood

Rowan Merewood

Building Better Developers

Rowan is a software engineer and technical team lead at the Inviqa group. He’s worked commercially with PHP for well over 6 years, dabbling before that in Python, Java, and BASIC if you go back far enough. His work has encompassed everything from tiny in-page scripts through to multi-million pound billing engines using a wide variety of open source technologies. Rowan is based in Sheffield, UK, makes semi-regular treks over to the PHPNW user group meetings and accidentally organises the Sheffield PHP user group. Talk to him about creative cocktails and appalling horror films.

Building Better Developers

Nothing stands still in this industry: new language features in your weapon of choice, nginx gaining ground on Apache, yet another standard you should be adhering to, loud hosting services making deployment as easy as "git push"… the list goes on. What can you do to make sure that you’re keeping up with all these changes without cloning yourself and only sleeping 3 hours a week?

It’s not just about improving your coding skill, it’s understanding how to make all your abilities and those of your peers work together to keep you ahead of the game. We’ll look at a combination of human hacks and hard work to help fine tune the most important machine you own.