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!

I'm not a fan of bragging, but something is going on here that makes me extremely proud.

It's been 7 years since I started to work for Ibuildings. Back then, they were an average development startup, focussed on delivering web applications, and they were using this fairly new, experimental, open source scripting language called PHP3.

It's fun to see how a company can grow with a language. I've seen PHP go from PHP3 to PHP4 and later from PHP4 to PHP5, and in the meanwhile, Ibuildings' focus has shifted more and more from a development shop to a PHP service company. Companies that used to be our competitors, gradually became our customers. And we've grown from a 3 people group to a crowd of 48.

And I'm proud (and not too shy) to say that at the moment, we are the only 100% PHP service company in The Netherlands, with projects ranging from plain old development and outplacement, to training and consultancy (audits, development methodology implementation, architecture etc.). And promoting PHP in general, with events such as the DPC earlier this year.

Last year I was very proud when Zend made us their official representative in The Netherlands. Besides the fact that we can now sell Zend products and services, which is nice for our sales people, I was particularly fond of this, as it confirmed that we must have been doing something right.

And now we're happy to announce we're going to do something left.

Recently we've seen increasing demand for PHP services in the UK. The adoption of open source in the UK has been a bit slower than on the European mainland, but PHP is finally gaining momentum there.
And if there's a market for PHP, there's a market for PHP services.

So now we are not only 'Ibuildings.nl BV', but also 'Ibuildings UK Ltd', and we have a home in London. Whoot! PHP on the right and on the left side of the road.

We already have a small group there doing cool things with PHP. And we're happy to have bright people such as Gavin Lee Foster, the author of Xinc on board.

I'm not bragging entirely without a reason. We are hiring. We have job openings in both the Netherlands and the UK. And we have plans in several other European countries as well (servicing those primarily from the UK and NL for now).

So if you're above average in terms of PHP skills, have good communication skills, and you want to use those skills not only to develop, but also to help others learn to see the power of PHP, send us proof of your skills, and an up to date resume, and we'll be in touch.

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.

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]