Posts Tagged ‘conference’

On june 16th we organized the first Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. The event was attended by more than 250 people and with speakers such as Cal Evans, Kevlin Henney, Lukas Smith, Derick Rethans and many others, I think it was a great event.

We've decided to make it a yearly event, so mark June 14, 2008 in your agenda for the next instalment.

I did a presentation on business frameworks (and ATK in particular) at the conference, the slides of which can be found on slideshare.

The DPC was not the only new conference, last monday I visited the first Zend UK PHP for Business Seminar organized by the London office of Zend. This conference was targeted at 'business people', and featured speakers such as Zeev Suraski, Harold Goldberg (Zend's new CEO), David Boloker (IBM) and Clint Oram (SugarCRM).

I had the honor of presenting a talk on 'enterprise PHP development' on the seminar. Since it was targeted at business people, I explained the development process of PHP applications using metaphors. What may be obvious for most of us, isn't so obvious for a lot of people and companies, so I found it important to talk about the process surrounding PHP development, and not just plain PHP coding itself.

Below are the slides of this talk:

This is the 7th presentation I did in 3 months time; I'm beginning to get the hang of this.

About a month ago we announced the Dutch PHP Conference that is going to take place in Amsterdam one week from now.

Apparently there is much demand for such a conference because we already sold out all tickets one day before the early bird discount ended, and our line-up wasn't even complete at that point.

We just confirmed the last addition to the program: Derick Rethans, from Xdebug and ezComponents fame, will give a talk about Test-driven Development.

The complete program is available on the conference website.

This week I was at the International PHP Conference. It was a nice conference with interesting topics. It was however a bit of a pity that the PHP conference got 'cornered' by the Webinale conference, which was a lot bigger and caused the PHP sessions to be in way too small rooms. But most of the sessions I visited were interesting, so all in all it was a nice conference.

There was one particular thing I noticed though: the amount of people using macbooks. I know that it's a popular notebook, but almost half of the laptops there was a mac!

See picture:

4 of the visible laptops are macbooks, and there were even more not directly visible on this picture.

Maybe my own laptop got scared of this, because it decided to die during the second day of the conference. It's probably a motherboard failure and repair will be expensive, so I'm thinking of buying a replacement.

Now I'm stuck with a dilemma. Should I buy a macbook?

Regardless of it's Cool Factor, what makes a macbook useful for PHP developers? What are features that are good, what are features that are hard to get used to for a developer switching to mac? Any ideas?

One thing I will miss if I buy a mac is the ability to write on it; I had a tablet pc and since I got it, all my notes were digital. So the alternative is a new tablet.

Tough choice!

(If you're curious, the picture was taken during Stephan Schmidt and Frank Kleine's talk on Annotations. Interesting presentations, although I have my doubts abusing the docblocks for declarations)

Ever since the International PHP Conference Spring Edition was cancelled last year, and moved to Germany this year, we've been planning to do a replacement conference for the Dutch PHP community.

We've worked hard the past few weeks to pull this together, and I am happy to announce that on June 16th, we will have the first instalment of the official Dutch PHP Conference!

The conference is oranised by Ibuildings with the help of Zend, and is targeted at a Dutch audience. We are still finalizing the program but we already have quite a lineup, with speakers such as Cal Evans, Lukas Smith, Kevlin Henney and Gaylord Aulke (all present in the PHP card deck ).

In total there will be 12 presentations divided over 3 parallel tracks. The Dutch PHP Usergroup will arrange an exhibition area where open source PHP project can show off their projects.

Following the example of the UK PHP Conference we are keeping the price low, at 75 euro if you register before the first of June. Registrations will start on monday, but you can already have a look at the conference web site:

http://www.phpconference.nl

I'm attending the UK PHP Conference in London next month. At approx. 72 euro entrance fee, and with only 40 euro worth of planetickets (ok, plus 60 euro airport tax but even then), this must be one of the cheapest conferences ever.

I'm very interested in Derick's talk about eZ components, as it has similarities to ATK, and some of the components seem very useful.

If any ATK users are attending, I'd be happy to meet you there. Just drop me a note.

Oh, and by the way:

[proud]

I'm among the 'lucky thousand':

Jeeej!

[/proud]

I'm preparing for the PHP conference. In about 5 hours, I'll be driving off with Sandy to Frankfurt. I hope to arrive there at around 11 o'clock, so we have some time to check in to our rooms, and populate our booth in the afternoon.

I have to get some sleep before I depart, but I'm currently preparing my laptop for the demo's. I've started this much too late this time, but luckily, Sandy prepared all the demo's so all I have to do is do a 'cvs -q update -d' and I should be up and running. Currently installing Open Office 2.0 to showcase the open office template engine we've added to ATK recently.

On to a different subject. This week, one of our users wrote a nice testimonial about his experience with ATK. It's always nice to receive compliments, but messages like this are of course extra motivating.