Derick Rethans
Derick Rethans is a PHP internals expert and author of Xdebug. He works as an independent contractor and consultant on PHP extensions, the PHP language, and related projects.
He works for the PHP Foundation to improve PHP, and continues to contribute to the PHP project in numerous forms. He is a frequent lecturer at conferences, the author of php|architect's Guide to Date and Time Programming, and the co-author of PHP 5 Power Programming.
Montreal 2026 sessions
Automating My House with Go and PHP
English session - Intermediate
In this presentation I will be showing how I use PHP, Go, and Home Assistant to automate many tasks in my office and house.
We'll be looking at how to interact with Home Assistant, with MQTT from both PHP and Go, and obtain sensor data. With this we can create complex scenarios for complex situations, such as trying to figure out how dark and cold/warm it is going to be in a room.
Saving Time by Using a Debugger
English session - Intermediate
In this talk I explain how to use Xdebug to get more productive writing PHP code, focussing on the improvements in Xdebug 3.5 such as Native Path Mapping, to make the debugging experience better and easier to set up.
Beyond that, this session also goes through a few complicated scenarios that are harder to debug, and shows solutions to these conundrums. I will also focus on the new features.
