I'm usually not very late with a conference report, but last week's events kept me busy. With Leoni having to work a Sunday shift however, I have a day to clean up some odds and ends, so here's my report.

The day to day reports can be read on our company blog so I'll just give a more general opinion on the conference and pick two favorite talks.

In many ways, Zendcon08 was an improvement over Zendcon07 (which already was a great conference, but it's nice to see Zend was able to improve it even more). Most notable for me was that the community aspect was bigger than last year. The Uncon (sessions organized by the community outside the main conference) was more prominent and more popular, and featured several outstanding sessions.

Also, the evening events got a lot more visitors than last year. The Yahoo! party was generally considered to be less than last year however, mainly due to the fact that unlike last year, there was only one free drink and any drinks afterward had ridiculous prices. But the ZCE party on monday, the general reception on tuesday and the meet the team session on wednesday were very nice and I got a chance to talk to a lot of people.

The opening keynote was still a bit 'corporate', with Harold, the CEO from Zend talking mainly about PHP adoption in the enterprise and some case studies. I liked it, but 'enterprise php' is kind of my thing; I heard several developers say they rather have something more technical. Another way they made the conference less corporate was that they dropped the vendor keynotes they had in 2007. Since those tend to be overly commercial, it was a good idea to skip them.

My favorite presentation was "The State of Ajax" by Ben Galbraith. I hadn't expected that actually; from the title I thought it would be Yet Another Ajax talk, but it was very insightful and Ben did a great job explaining current and future trends. Most interesting thing I got out of it was getting to know Fluid, a 'site specific browser' that lets you treat webapps such as Gmail, Facebook, Google Calendar etc. as separate desktop applications with even nifty things such as Growl notifications or 'new mail' indicators in the OSX dock. I immediately installed it on my macbook and I love it.

My second favorite was Terry Chay's uncon session on 'Making Frameworks Suck Less'. I hope Terry will convert that into a real talk, as it was even better than his 'The internet is an Ogre' talk: this time he had a lot more valid points and he did a better job of getting them across. (On the other hand, if he converts this to a real talk, probably the charm of running it as an informal uncon session using just a flip-chart will be lost.)

The next conference I'm looking forward to is php|works where for the first time a PHP conference is combined with a Python conference. It will be interesting to see how that works out. But first I'll be visiting Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference in October. Although that is not likely to contain a lot of PHP, I was invited by Microsoft because they want to reach out to the PHP community (which was also obvious from their ZendCon presence), so let's find out what they have to tell us.

The Dutch PHP Conference 2008 is over. Since I was one of the organizers, I'll leave reviews of the contents etc. up to others, but here's my look on the conference from an organizing perspective.

On friday, the conference started with a tutorial day. There were 5 tutorials: PHPUnit by Sebastian Bergmann, XDebug by Derick Rethans, Zend Framework by Matthew Weier O'Phinney, Symfony by Fabien Potencier and Stefan Koopmanschap, and Advanced PHP: Design Patterns by Dennis-Jan Broerse. The tutorial day was attended by 150 people.

The day started pretty chaotic; the van that contained the registration badges arrived late, so there was hardly enough time to prepare the registration desk, so we had a small queue, but eventually everybody got in. The other issue we had was that we had asked the venue to provide power because people would bring there laptops. We started off however with only 4 outlets per room, and with 30-40 peple in the room, that obviously is not enough. Luckily, before the first break we were able to get a whole cart with power supplies, which we hastily dropped in the rooms. It looked a bit like a cable jungle, but at least people had juice.

For the rest, the day ran smoothly and according to plan, we had a nice lunch around noon, and overall feedback on the tutorial day was good.

At 17.30, we went to the Werck bar where we had dinner with the Ibuildings crew and a bunch of Zenders (Matthew, Gaylord, Zeev, Steven and Howard). At 20.00, DPC conference people started showing up at the bar for the friday-night conference social. Dinner ran a bit late but around 20.30 we were able to join the other DPC visitors in the bar, just in time for the Netherlands-France euro2008 match. The party was great, the match was superb (NL won by 4-1), and the atmosphere was awesome. Speakers like Terry Chay and Derick Rethans were dressed up in orange (Terry even had created a custom orange shirt with php code on it) and we all had a great time.

At around 23.30 I went back the hotel area with Derick, Terry, Scott, Mike, Helgi and one of the phplondon guys who's name I can't remember. Derick and Terry walked back to their hotel and I had a last beer with the other guys.

I made some final adjustments to my slides for the opening address (which for some reason is more difficult after more than a couple of beers) and at around 1.30 I went to sleep. At 6 I woke up, checked if my adjustments were ok when sober, made some more changes, went over the slides for my afternoon presentation, and got prepared for the main conference day.

The main conference day went even smoother than the tutorial day. Registration was properly prepared and went smooth, everything was nice on schedule (with just a small exception caused by a crashing macbook right before the closing keynote), and I think we were able to organize a very nice conference (feedback is appreciated!).

We had some php|architect books for sale during lunch. We had about 50 books because we had no clue if people would be willing to buy them, but we ended up selling 45 books within the first 20 minutes. We will bring a little more next year.

An interesting observation was that the PHP Women had trouble getting people to take their promotional shirts. Where at the PHPLondon Conference they were gone before they knew it, in Amsterdam the men were a little hesitant to wear a shirt with the word 'women' on it (by the way only 1% of the DPC audience was female, which is startling). Together with Matthew Weier O'Phinney I was selected as the girls' official 'Booth Babe', a kind of supporting role with a special edition of the shirts, but I got some really weird remarks on that. I think the phpwomen have to change their marketing to cater to a continental european audience or at least to get the men involved. (Suggestion: s/babe/hunk; babe is usually only used for the female version over here).

When the conference ended, there were drinks and snacks in the lounge, giving people the opportunity to discuss the presentations and talk to the speakers.

And then the day ended with a final speaker's dinner, and that was the end of the Dutch PHP Conference 2008.

There are already over a 100 pictures on flickr, which give a nice impression of the conference.

I'm already looking forward to organizing it again next year! (mark June 12 and 13 in your calendars!)

Having returned from php|tek, I nearly forgot to post the last entry in my series of reports from the conference.

Since I had been discussing with people until 1am the night before the last conference day, I couldn't wake myself up early enough to view the first session, although I really would've like to see the session named 'Angering Database Gods' just because of the title. I did see the second session, which was done by Digg's senior developer Eli White, who did a talk on 'High Performance PHP and MySQL scaling techniques'. It was an interesting overview of scaling techniques. We're using some of them, and it's interesting to see that even though Digg operates at a much larger scale, the same scaling techniques are often used.

Next, I had a nice talk with Marco Tabini and Elizabeth Naramore, the publisher and editor of my upcoming 'Enterprise PHP' book, about its release. We're going to do some fun things for the release (hopefully around the Dutch PHP Conference), more on that when the time comes.

Then, I attended the second to last talk by Brian Shire about APC at FaceBook. The talk was a detailed overview of APC and its features, the only issue was that from the back where I was sitting, most of the slides were a little hard to read. (Brian, please add an 'about' page or at least your name somewhere to your blog, I had a hard time finding it and still rely on links on other sides to see if I got your blog url right ;))

At 12.15h, Terry Chay closed the conference with his 'The internet is an Ogre' keynote. Terry perfectly demonstrated why his keynotes are usually listed as 'explicit', and talked about Stability, Scalability, Speed and Security and the importance of handling those in this exact order. Terry has an open mind, and asked that if people would disagree, to post their opinion online. I agree to most of what Terry said though, but I also agree with Ed Finkler who noted that this depends a lot on the type of application you build. Not everyone builds a Tagged, a Facebook or the next Twitter (there will be a next twitter, mark my words), and for many apps, these 4 S's come in a different order. Also, I think the part on Security wasn't so much on security but about extending the application ('making it rich'). Naming this 'Security' seems a little far-fetched.

In particular I liked what he said about Rails, how it tries to solve the wrong problem for many websites: Rails saves time during the initial development, even if this is only, say, 10% of your total cost and you're really interested in scalability and speed. While it sure is fun to bash Rails (and that's one of the things we love Terry for), I think this is true for many frameworks, or even programming languages.

In any case, Terry is a great speaker and the keynote was very humorous. If you missed the presentation, he's also doing it at the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam next month (arranged your flight yet Terry? :-))

(Oh, and it was nice to hear Terry talk about the 'kung fu' experience that most first-time ruby users have. I had that Kung Fu experience once, but while I said back then that I would start to use Ruby, 2 years later I still haven't. Which is saying something.)

And that wraps up 5 days of great fun. I agree with Ben Ramsey's post that in particular the conference was great community-wise. The way it was set up, with lots of breaks, lunches and evening socials, helped foster the community at the conference and everybody got a chance to meet many new people.

I'll make sure to attend again next year! (note to self: keep an eye on the Call For Papers before you miss it again. :))

Thursday at php|tek started off with a keynote by SugarCRM's co-founder Jacob Taylor. Although Jacob is a seasoned speaker, it wasn't as interesting as I would've thought. It was more or less the success story of SugarCRM, and it even contained some slides to introduce PHP. I think with an audience consisting of developers that are usually not very much involved with CRM software and who know PHP's history, it would've been a better presentation if it had focussed on the technical aspects a bit more.

After the keynote, I visited Jason Sweat's talk on 'Test Driven Design'. It was an interesting presentation, demonstrating the SimpleTest test framework, but the talk was more on development than on actual architectural design.

Next up was Scott MacVicar, with a presentation on SQLite3. Although SQLite has been around for a while, a lot of developers haven't worked with it, so it's very useful to have an introductory session like this at a PHP conference.

After a good lunch consisting of pizza and salads, Joe Stagner from Microsoft did a very interesting keynote. See this blog post for a report that I wrote right after the keynote.

After Joe's keynote, I remained in the Grand Ballroom to watch Greg Beaver give his talk on Phar. I haven't worked with phar yet (a method to deploy applications as a single file in a so-called 'PHp ARchive'), but it sounds very useful so I'm definitely going to look at that. I was amazed to read on Greg's blog that he's never done a PHP presentation before. That is pretty weird for a guy who's done so much work on PEAR and phpDocumentor. In any case, he did great and his presentation came across very natural.

The last presentation I attended was Maggie Nelson's presentation on database migration. She presented methods for maintaining two-way database patches, and the use of SVN to make patch management easier. I think this is an important topic, as deployment often only covers source code files, but the database is just as much a part of the deployment process as the code.

In the evening, there were 2 parties. First, Mashery had a Pizza party at the 11th floor of the hotel, which was attended by a lot of people so it kind of was like a sauna in there. The pizza's were unfortunately rather exactly the same as during lunch (same caterer) but as they were good pizza's, we still had a nice diner. Second, there was a party hosted by Zend in the Grand Ballroom, with some snacks and free drinks (for about an hour only unfortunately, after which prices went up to their old 8$ a bottle insane hotel pricing scheme). This party was attended very well too.

During the party I had many conversations with old friends and new friends, tasted a very nice Scotch that Scott had brought along, and a weird (but tasty) licorice/wodka drink that Hilmar Hallbjornsson was passing around, and had a chat with Oracle's Christopher Jones about PHP, Oracle and other things.

Around 22.00h the party had ended, but Eric David, Shahar Evron, Andrew Culver, Gennady Feldman and I remained in the grand ballroom and had a very interesting discussion about religion, politics and science. With 5 different nationalities represented and 4 different religions (if you count atheism as a religion), this was a very interesting talk, which went on until 1am even (so we had to snatch Marco's water bottles which they had left unattended, in order to not dehydrate. :)) The discussion featured interesting IT metaphors such as "praying is like a communication bus with each religion having its own protocol" and "reincarnation requires a stack because the number of souls is not constant". 5 people with different backgrounds but with one thing in common: IT and PHP. It's nice to see what interesting discussions come from that.

At 1am, I noticed on twitter that people were still hanging out at Homeless Joe's, but since I have to fly back later today, I thought it would be better to get some rest.

Today is the last day. I had the honor of announcing a partnership with php|architect, and in about half an hour Terry Chay will close the conference; but more on that in day 3's report.