Posts Tagged ‘community’

I'm proud to announce that we're organizing another edition of the Dutch PHP Conference, with the help of the great people at Zend. It will be in Amsterdam on June 13 and 14 this year.

Last year we organized it for the first time, and based on feedback from our visitors we have made several changes to this years event:

• We now have 2 days instead of 1 (1 tutorial day + 1 conference day).

• Last years event was sold out way too early so we increased capacity (still, don't wait too long to get tickets ).
• A new website with more relevant information, which will be updated regularly as we move closer to the conference. The new site is at www.phpconference.nl.
• We only fixed part of the program, and visitors can help finalize it (more on that below).
• The conference will be in English, because we had more visitors from abroad than we had expected last year.

So far, we already have been able to attract great names from the PHP community such as Zeev Suraski, Marco Tabini and Sebastian Bergmann. More will be added as we get closer to the conference.

To finalize the schedule, we want to do something different. Instead of the more common 'Call for Papers' where speakers can submit their talks, we're doing a 'Call for Ideas', where we want to hear from our visitors (or potential visitors) who they would like to see at the conference, or which topics they would like to hear about. We can't guarantee availability of speakers of course, but we'll try to match the requests as close as possible. Enter your ideas at the box in the bottom right of the website.

Oh, and for those who were present last year, this time we have a dedicated internet connection for speakers and a redundant beamer.

I hope to see you all in June!

A few weeks ago Matthew gave me a deck of php playing cards and there's been some kind of weird poll going on over here regarding the Queen of Clubs, aka Joyce Park.

The picture in this card looked kind of weird, so someone started a discussion whether Joyce is either a) wearing a yellowish t-shirt with a black trim, or b) it's not a t-shirt and she's wearing a black necklace. (See picture here).

It seemed that everyone had an opinion and, nerdy as we are, soon there was a poll up on one of our whiteboards. The losers would buy the winners candybars.

Eventually, there were 9 of us (including me) that voted for the shirt, and only 4 that voted for the necklace. It's clearly a shirt in the picture. Right?

Yesterday, finally, using the obscure means of posting a comment to Joyce's blog, coworker Peter found out the truth.

So I've lost a Mars.

But this smelled fishy. There appears to be an original picture in which the distinction is clearly visible. It appears that the card has been heavily photoshopped. No wonder her necklace turned into a shirt.

So bottom line: Cal, you owe me a Mars.