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Today is 90210 day. http://bit.ly/aBysnN I really have nothing witty to say about that.

Saturday, June 28 2008

Dutch PHP Conference

Ibuildings, my employer, recently organised a dutch, php centric conference called Dutch PHP conference, (Hey at least points for obvious naming). Of course all employees could attend the conference for free. Now i've been to quite a few conferences and gatherings over the years but i've never really been to a programming language conference before. So i was actually kind of curious to what it would be like.



With around 300 people and a fairly concentrated location the atmosphere was nice and relaxed, perhaps also because it was a developers conference the overall feeling was casual, also because of the relative low amount of people it had a very personal feeling, but perhaps this was also because ~70 of those people where my colleagues.

The talks themselves where interesting and the speakers where all good at keeping the room concentrated on the speaker but i found that the talks lacked some technical depth that i would have expected from a programmers conference. On the other hand the first day i was absolutely a wreck because i had to wake up at 5 o'clock. It also might have been my choice in talks, because i just followed the main track which might have been the 'light' version of the conference talks.



Some notable thing i took away from DPC would be the crash coarse in Zend Framework by Matthew Weier O'Phinney. I especially like the fact that ZF can be used as much or as little as you want, making it ideal for those small projects you have where you just want the ease of use of a framework without the fuss of overcomplicating the project by actually using a full fledged framework.

PHP 5.3 and PHP 6 - A look ahead by Stefan Priebsch was nice, although it was a pity his talk was only half a hour+. He had a very nice relaxed style of presenting with just the right amount of facts and his own opinions on those. It was nice that he allowed for a discussion on the namespaces feature, but since i don't really care for that feature i would have rather had him cut that short a bit sooner.

The two closing keynotes by respectively Marco Tabini and Terry Chay where also real nice, not so much because of the body of their talks, but more because the energy with which they presented their talks.



Marco's talk was mainly about there being no real mayo in america, we should focus on the cost-per-page when considering the business model and that cloud computing can help control those costs.

I don't really remember what Terry's talk was about, except that he used a lot of shrek movie snippets and slagging ruby on rails. His talk was really chaotic and i think missed some focus. But it might also be because it was essentially the last talk of the day so i might have been a bit drowsy. Hearing PHP being compared to a ball with nails sticking out of it was pretty funny though. His reasoning was that PHP might be ugly from a language standpoint, but at least it sticks to things.

A thing i noticed was that there where very little vendor stands, the only three where Zend, PHPWoman and phpGG. I would have at least expected there to be some stand from red hat, mysql and/or oracle.