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Ruth is heading to Meet Magento Netherlands in Amsterdam on November 5, 2026. It’s the fifth stop on her Magento circuit this year, after London, Prague, Manchester, and Mainz.

The one-day Magento and Adobe Commerce community conference takes place at LIEF Amsterdam, a former bus depot turned event space. It is presented by Mage-OS Netherlands, an initiative of the Dutch Magento community that represents the Magento, Adobe Commerce, and Mage-OS ecosystem in the Netherlands.

If you’re attending, Ruth is always up for a conversation about Magento performance, how your team uses Tideways, or what’s keeping you busy in the ecosystem right now.

Write to her at [email protected] if you want to make sure that you don’t miss each other.

See you in Amsterdam!

Tideways will join Meet Magento DE 2026 as a Gold Sponsor on October 22, 2026, at Pyramide Mainz. Benjamin and Ruth will represent Tideways on-site.

After a break, Meet Magento is returning to Germany, bringing the DACH Magento community back together in the country where it all began.

The event is organized by CustomGento, e3n, and run as root, supported by JetBrains. Thanks go out to Tobias Niebergall, Simon Sprankel, Rico Neitzel, and David Lambauer for putting the effort in.

Supporting community events is our way of nurturing the passion, knowledge, and connections that drive our ecosystem forward.

The event features two tracks. The business track covers e-commerce strategy, marketing, and growth; the technical track dives into Hyvä, Magento Open Source, Mage-OS, and Adobe Commerce.

Ruth has focused on Magento this year and already met the community at Meet Magento UK in London, Meet Magento Czech in Prague, and soon at Mage Camp in Manchester. Mainz will be her fourth stop on the Meet Magento circuit in 2026.

If you are attending Meet Magento DE, we would be happy to meet you. Whether you want to talk about Magento performance, profiling and application monitoring, share your experience with Tideways, discuss challenges your team is facing, or simply have a conversation about the Magento ecosystem, feel free to say hello.

There are still tickets available.

Write to us at [email protected] if you want to make sure that we don’t miss each other.

See you in Mainz on October 22!

On July 7, the Magento and Adobe Commerce community will gather in London for Meet Magento UK 2026.

Organized by JH in partnership with the Magento Association, Meet Magento UK brings together merchants, agencies, developers, technology partners, and Adobe Commerce experts for a day of talks, networking, and community exchange.

The conference features presentations covering Adobe Commerce, Magento Open Source, e-commerce technology, development best practices, infrastructure, security, and business growth.

Ruth from the Tideways team will be attending this year’s event. As part of our Customer Success team, she works closely with customers across onboarding, billing, customer experience, marketing, and strategic initiatives.

Apart from the main event, she will be attending “Women in Ecomm” on July 6.

If you’re attending, she’d love to connect. Whether you’d like to discuss your experience with Tideways, share feedback, talk about your team’s challenges, or simply learn more about how other Magento teams use application monitoring and observability, feel free to reach out.

Write to her at [email protected] if you want to make sure that you don’t miss each other.

See you in London!

ScaleCommerce, one of our longest-standing partners, is hosting their annual e-commerce BBQ in Karlsruhe.

Join the community on June 11, 2026 at HubRaum Karlsruhe for a day of workshops, conversations, and networking.

Benjamin will be there and is happy to talk to you about PHP performance and Agentic AI performance improvements.

Write to us at [email protected] to make sure we don’t miss each other.

The Shopware Community Day (SCD) brings together merchants, developers, and industry leaders for a day of insights, strategy, and innovation at Confex in Cologne.

Benjamin and Diana are looking forward to engaging discussions on performance, Shopware, and agentic AI-driven optimizations.

If you’ll be there too, let’s connect!

Schedule an appointment beforehand: [email protected].

The IPC, organized by Software & Support Media GmbH, takes place from June 8th to 12th and features a lineup of well-known community members.

Unlike Munich, this time it’s a home game for Volker: he doesn’t have far to travel to IPC Berlin.

In his talk

PHP Performance Demystified—Measure, Understand, Optimize

taking place June 10th at 11:45, he’ll explore options for PHP performance analysis. From understanding how the PHP virtual machine and OPCodes work to performing your own reliable and meaningful benchmarks and how to use request profiling using open-source and commercial offerings.

You will leave with an overview of the available tools and an understanding of how to use them in your day-to-day work, learning how to confidently identify and remove performance bottlenecks.

Volker is Head of Engineering at Tideways, so PHP performance is his daily business. As release manager for PHP 8.5, he is naturally involved in the latest developments.

With more than 20 years of experience in software development, Volker has been working with PHP since its inception, enabling him to place developments in a broader context and distinguish between a temporary fad and a profound and significant change.

Volker would be happy to talk to you. Write to him at [email protected] if you want to make sure you don’t miss each other.

Tideways will be attending PHPDay, the long-running PHP conference organized by GrUSP. The event takes place in Verona, Italy, on May 14–15, 2026.

This year, Tideways is joining as a Gold Sponsor.

From our team, Volker, Tim, and Tobi will be on site. Volker will also be speaking at the conference.

Talk: Shipping PHP 8.5

In “Shipping PHP 8.5”, Volker shares a release manager’s perspective on how a new PHP version comes together. The talk covers the features in PHP 8.5 and explains how releasing and contributing to a PHP version works in general.

You’ll learn how individual contributors and the PHP Foundation shape a new PHP release, how features make it into PHP, how decisions are made, and how to navigate the process, both to better understand PHP’s evolution and to contribute to the core language yourself.

If you’re attending PHPDay, make sure to catch Volker’s session.

If you’d like to connect with our developers during the conference, feel free to reach out at [email protected].

Our partner, bitExpert AG, is hosting a Sylius Hackathon and Meetup on Thursday, April 30, in Mannheim, Rudolf Diesel Str. 40 to 46.

The event starts with a hackathon at 10:00 and continues with a meetup from 18:00 featuring several talks and networking.

If you want to attend the hackathon, contact Stephan Hochdörfer at [email protected].

Tideways will be on site, and Benjamin will give a talk at 18:45 titled “PHP Profiler and Tideways Intro”.

The session focuses on how to understand application performance in production environments. It covers how PHP profiling works, how to identify bottlenecks in real applications, and how Tideways helps you analyze performance across requests and services.

If you are working with PHP and want to get a clearer picture of what your application is doing under load, this talk is a practical starting point.

The meetup includes additional talks on Sylius, payments, and AI and concludes with networking.

Write to us at [email protected] if you want to make sure that we do not miss each other.

What: SymfonyLive 2026

Where: CineStar CUBIX Berlin

When: April 23-24, 2026

Benjamin will be attending SymfonyLive 2026 and contributing a talk focused on one of the most relevant changes in modern PHP.

With PHP 8.4, native support for lazy loading and proxy objects becomes part of the language itself. This removes the need for many of the workarounds and generated code that frameworks and libraries have relied on so far. Both Doctrine and Symfony have historically implemented the proxy pattern through custom solutions.

In this session, Benjamin will take a closer look at PHP 8.4’s native lazy object capabilities and explain what changes in practice. He will outline how these new features reduce complexity, lower overhead, and simplify long-standing patterns in both Doctrine and Symfony. The talk will also explore what this means for the future of these ecosystems and how developers can start thinking about adopting these improvements.

Talk details

Thursday, April 23, 2026

14:00 to 14:40

If you are attending SymfonyLive, this session offers a practical perspective on how core language changes can reshape familiar tools and patterns.

Write to us at [email protected] if you want to make sure that we don’t miss each other.

On April 9th, the team behind Manychat is organizing a PHP meetup in Barcelona, bringing together developers interested in getting more out of PHP without unnecessary complexity.

The event will feature two talks focused on performance and modern PHP development, followed by discussion, drinks, and snacks.

Event Details

What: PHP Meetup hosted by Manychat

When: April 9th, starting at 6:30 pm

Where: NN Working, Carrer de Pau Claris 194, 4th floor, Barcelona

Admission: Free

Our participation

Volker Dusch, Head of Engineering at Tideways and PHP 8.5 Release Manager, will be joining the event as a speaker.

In his talk, Volker will explore how developers can better understand and optimize the performance of their PHP applications.

Talk: PHP Performance Demystified—Measure, Understand, Optimize

In this talk, Volker will walk through practical approaches to analyzing and improving PHP performance.

The session will cover topics such as how the PHP virtual machine and OPCodes work, how to run reliable benchmarks, and how request profiling tools can help uncover performance bottlenecks.

Attendees will leave with an overview of the available tools and a clearer understanding of how to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in day-to-day development.

About Volker Dusch

Volker serves as Head of Engineering at Tideways, thus making PHP performance his day-to-day focus. As Release Manager for PHP 8.5, he is naturally involved in the latest developments.

With more than 20 years of experience in software development, Volker has been working with PHP since its early days, enabling him to place developments in a broader context and distinguish between a passing fad and meaningful changes.

Second Talk

The meetup will also feature a talk by Max Fomichev, Infrastructure Engineer at Manychat.

Topic: PHP Fibers: Simplifying Async Code and Speeding Up Development

In his talk, he will show how PHP Fibers and asynchronous HTTP requests speed up code writing and execution without cognitive overhead for developers.

Join Volker in Barcelona

After the talks, there will be time to exchange ideas with other developers. If you are in Barcelona, Volker would be glad to meet you there.

Write to us at [email protected] if you’d like to make sure we connect at the event.

To catch the special spirit of community events like the Shopware Community UnConference (SCUC), you have to attend them! This year, SCUC takes place on March 28–29 at TOR 28 in Cologne.

Do you like surprises? Then SCUC is for you. As always, perfectly organized by FireGento e.V., the event features surprise sessions selected democratically, the hallmark of any true UnConference.

And if you’ve attended before, you already know that Carmen, Claudia, Fabian, and Rico tend to have a few extra surprises up their sleeves. After all, SCUC is celebrating its fifth birthday in 2026. We’re grateful to see them bringing the community together once again and creating space for connection and collaboration.

No surprise here: lively discussions, fresh insights, and excellent coffee. Refreshments will be provided, with Tideways sponsoring lunch on Saturday.

There will also be a pre-party at Alte Feuerwache on Friday with a round of introductions to get to know each other and an after-show party at Craftbeer Corner to celebrate new and old friendships.

Write to us at [email protected] if you’d like to make sure we don’t miss each other.

Benjamin and Diana are looking forward to seeing you in Cologne!

Scones, hash browns, baked beans—guess where our colleague Volker, PHP 8.5 Release Manager, is headed! The PHPUK Conference in London, which we are sponsoring, is taking place February 20th. It offers extensive catering, but we don’t know if the above delicacies will be included.

What we do know is that Volker will be providing practical insights into the performance of PHP. Not only in his presentation, but also off-stage. PHPUK is about connecting and networking, so don’t shy away from approaching him.

Volker has 20 years of software development experience under his belt; he has worked as an engineer, team lead, and head of engineering, focusing primarily on PHP, Go, C, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and system operations.

His journey with Tideways has been going on for several years now, and we’re happy to have him. It’s a good fit, as PHPUK is a long-standing cornerstone of the European PHP community.

They have been maintaining a YouTube channel since 2012, with Rasmus Lerdorf as their first speaker. Fourteen years later, Volker picks up with his presentation:

PHP Performance Demystified—Measure, Understand, Optimize

In his talk, starting at 2:30 pm, he’ll explore options for PHP performance analysis. From understanding how the PHP virtual machine and OPCodes work to performing your own reliable and meaningful benchmarks and how to use request profiling using open-source and commercial offerings.

You will leave with an overview of the available tools and an understanding of how to use them in your day-to-day work. Learning how to spot bottlenecks and optimize them away efficiently and confidently.

If you’re attending, make sure to stop by and say hi, with a healthy respect for queues, please.

Get the tea set ready and prepare for in-depth PHP talks!

Write to Volker at [email protected] if you want to make sure that you don’t miss each other.

We’re celebrating Symfony’s 20^th anniversary November on 27^th and 28^th by joining the festivities and by giving a talk! Join Benjamin at The Beurs van Berlage, a historical meeting place in the heart of Amsterdam.

Benjamin will present the topic:

Starting with PHP 8.4 you can implement lazy loading and proxy objects with native PHP functionality with little overhead and no code generation required. Both Doctrine and Symfony are historically using the proxy pattern with solutions and workarounds built in PHP. In this talk I will explain PHPs 8.4s native lazy objects and how it will be a game changer to both Doctrine and Symfony going forward.

There’ll be a myriad of other interesting talks and opportunities to chat and connect throughout the day.

Make sure we don’t miss each other, and drop us a line at [email protected] if you’d like to connect in person.

We’re going all out! Volker is lacing up his hiking boots to come to Munich from Berlin. Well, maybe with a little help from Deutsche Bahn.

The IPC, organized by Software & Support Media GmbH, takes place from October 27th to 31st and boasts a top-class lineup with many well-known names of the community.

Come join Volker at this summit; he’ll show you how to reach the optimization peak. As PHP 8.5. Release Manager, he takes you to the heights of PHP knowledge, talking about upcoming changes in PHP’s November 2025 release. Performance, new features, big ecosystem news, and how to easily deal with upcoming deprecations will be the topics he covers in his talk:

What’s New In PHP 8.5

Wednesday, October 29th, 10:15–11:15 CT.

In his talk:

PHP Performance Demystified—Measure, Understand, Optimize

he’ll explore options for PHP performance analysis. From understanding how the PHP virtual machine and OPCodes work to performing your own reliable and meaningful benchmarks and how to use request profiling using open-source and commercial offerings.

You will leave with an overview of the available tools and an understanding of how to use them in your day-to-day work. Learning how to spot bottlenecks and optimize them away efficiently and confidently.

Tuesday, October 28th, 12:00–13:00 CT.

Volker would be happy to talk to you. For the conference, he will likely exchange his hiking clothes for a Tideways T-shirt. But write to him at [email protected] anyway if you want to make sure you don’t miss each other. And don’t be spooked, even if it’s Halloween. We won’t “ghost” you!

There are still tickets available; don’t miss the chance.

Taking place in Cologne, October 24-26, organized by FireGento e.V. – the Mage UnConference! I’m glad I can say Happy 10th anniversary in person. Write to me at [email protected] if you want to make sure that we don’t miss each other.

If this wasn’t an UnConference, you would probably find a schedule with speakers and topics here. But an UnConference is different! Everyone is welcome to suggest topics for talks or workshops and present them in a few sentences. In this democratic process, topics of interest are selected right there on-site on the day of the venue. Time to vote! All attendees have two votes. The sessions with the most votes are selected to fill the timetable.

Merge and emerge! If topics are similar and complement one another, there is the possibility to merge them. This often turns out as a great starting point for a discussion and new ideas emerge.

It’s just like a Kinder Surprise (Überraschungsei) – when you decide to go and buy the ticket, you know you will get something interesting, fun, and delicious – but you don’t know exactly what it will be. The surprise factor makes it extra-exciting. Speaking of tickets: There are still a few available!

Speaking of children, what makes the UnConferences organized by Carmen, Claudia, Fabian, and Rico extra special and family-friendly is that they offer childcare.

And, to make the triad perfect, speaking of delicious-prepare yourselves for great coffee in abundance. There’s no better way to strike up a conversation than over a good cup of coffee!

During the ticket buying process I liked the question “If you were to bake us a birthday cake – what would it look like (and what would be inside)” best. I spill the beans here and share my answer: It would have a mage on top and would be filled with a surprise! I’m very surprised if there actually will be a cake and if so, what will be inside!