Last friday was the third edition of the PHPLondon conference. I had the pleasure and honor of opening the conference with my 'Enterprise PHP' talk. (My slides are on slideshare).

I've attended the first PHPLondon conference 2 years ago, and it was great to see the progress that they made since then. The venue, the presentations, the catering, the organization, everything was improved significantly and contributed to a great conference. I'd like to thank Paul Morgan, Matt Raines and all the crew for organizing this conference. I'm proud that my company was allowed to sponsor this event.

And as with most conferences, the social aspect was even nicer than the actual talks. I've met many old friends, and was introduced to many new ones.

It started with the pre-conference speakers dinner, where I had some interesting discussions on a range of topics including music, PHP, DRM, web 2.0 and how social networks are changing the recruitment business, with Paul Morgan, Ian P. Christian, Toby Beresford, Jonathan Mills and Matt Raines. After dinner, we went to the Theodore Bullfrog pub where members of PHPLondon had just had a presentation on Imagick by Mikko Koppanen.

In the pub I had an interesting talk with vBulletin's Mike Sullivan about running a succesful commercial php project, and met Lorna Jane Mitchell for the second time in two weeks and got to know her better half Kevin.

For someone who lives in a country where hardly anybody goes to a pub before 23.00h, it's still a bit weird to see pubs in London closing at that time, but we went back to the hotel and some of us continued drinks and conversations in the hotel bar. Derick Rethans at one point used the phrase "Why does everything around me look green?" at which point I thought it would be better to look up my bed so I would have a clear mind the next morning. Had a final quick glance through my slides before I went to bed, but I actually fell asleep behind my laptop in the process, so I left that until the morning.

Friday was the conference day, which, as I mentioned above, was great. After the conference there were a few hours of drinks and snacks. Richard Harrison was kind enough to give me one of the famous blue Elephpants (will upload picture soon) and he told me about his new company, Pluggable, which looks very promising.

At the end, a group of roughly 35 went to the Bavarian Beerhouse where we had lots of German beer, German food and 'Dirndl' waitresses.

And that marked the end of a great conference. It's one I'm sure to visit again next year!

Tags: community, conference, london, phplondon08, uk

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