Akra’s DevNotes

I'm delighted to be able to announce that I'm speaking at TEK X in May, in Chicago. This is one of the big US PHP conferences and I feel privileged to be invited.

I'll be concentrating on Zend Framework with a tutorial called "Building a Zend Framework application" and a talk on "Working with Zend_Form". After a couple of less technical talks recently, it'll be fun to dive into strongly technical content. Hopefully, I'll be able to explain Zend_Form well enough that people will understand it too!

The International PHP Conference 2009 took place last week in Karlsrule, Germany.

This conference has presentations in both English and German, though fortunately, there was always at least one English session in each time slot! I managed to get to a fair few sessions.

Cal Evans' talk on Zend Framework command line applications was an especial highlight as it's an area that we could do better and I now know how to! Similarly, we recently wrote a SOAP Server for a project using Zend_Soap which has been educational. David Zülke's talk on SOAP filled in some gaps in my knowledge which was useful.

I know I'm late on this one, and I only have the pathetic excuse of being busy. However, ZendCon 2009 was a great conference and I want to thank Eli, Zend and S&S for putting it on.

I gave two talks; a Zend Framework Certification refresher tutorial and a talk on project management. Overall I was happy with how both talks went. I think that my presentation style has improved considerably over the last year as I am much more confident and it shows. Hopefully most of the people in the sessions gained from them.

As always, I learnt new things in other sessions I attended, learning about Solar, Zend Framework, deployment, MySQL and countless other things. I also gained from meeting the many people who were there. The conversations outside of the sessions are equally as valuable as I learn tips and tricks from people facing the same sort of problems that I do.

We also socialised after hours too:

All in all, a great conference, and I hope that I manage to get there again in 2010.

The PHPNW 09 Conference took place last Saturday and I've finally found time to write up my thoughts on it.

I went up on Friday in order to meet up with the speakers for dinner and also to go to the pre-conference social at the Lass O'Gowrie.

The conference was kicked off with an excellent keynote by Kevlin Henney on uncertainty. The main point I took away was that the attitude of "any decision is better than no decision" is completely wrong for software development. It is much better to delay a decision until you have enough information to make it.

There were two tracks for the rest of the day. I listened to Lorna Mitchell talk about development best practices in the context of The Joel Test. This was interesting and I was pleased to note that whilst my company doesn't have a score of 12, we have talked about all the items internally.

I then listened to Rowan Merewood of Plusnet who talked about introducing new tools and development practices into a team environment. One key point he made was that it is important to have a "champion" on the team to push for the new tool/practice and I couldn't agree more. Everything that has "stuck" in our team has been because someone in the team really cares about it.

The provided lunch was very good and a noticeable step-up from last year's sandwiches :) I also noticed that the WiFi seemed to work well too.

After lunch, it was my turn to talk about project management. Whilst not something that most of the delegates would do in their day to day work, I hope that they learnt a little of how the project management process works. Maybe, even picking up a few ideas on how they can help out with ensuring a project is a success. I can say with certainty that the most successful projects that I've managed have most closely followed what I talked about. The ones that go wrong are the ones where we take shortcuts which then come back and bite us!

After my talk, Derick Rethans talked about how useful Xdebug is and how to use its many features.

I bowed out of the talks at this point and spent the next couple of hours talking to people and learning interesting stuff on a more personal level.

The closing session included a segment by Microsoft where they talked about Expression. I found this quite frustrating as I couldn't help but think that they could have used the time better to tell us about how great PHP is on Windows now. They should be shouting about the fact that Windows is now a first class server platform for PHP applications at every opportunity. Not telling us about a wire-framing tool. What do I know though?!

After the conference, Sun Microsystems sponsored an open bar which was very much appreciated.

On Sunday, a set of informal sessions took place at MOSI. I overslept and managed to miss the first couple of hours and then spent the rest of the time talking to people rather than listening to sessions. It's a habit I have! I also looked around the museum and could quite easily go back and spend a day or two there.

All in all, PHPNW 09 was a fantastic conference.

I'm going to be at PHPNW 09, ZendCon 09 and IPC 09 this autumn and fully expect to meet people that I know online, but haven't met in person before.

The big problem for me is that I have trouble connecting the dots, so if we end up talking, please mention where I might know you from.

For example: "Hi, I'm John. You might know me as phpsupercooldude on the zftalk channel on freenode"

and I'll be able to place you correctly and may even remember you the next time I see you!

I'm speaking at ZendCon 2009 this year!

I'm doing a tutorial session called Zend Framework Certification Bootcamp where I'll be highlighting key sections of Zend Framework that you'll need to know in order to pass the the ZFCE exam.

I'm also presenting a standard session, Getting a website out of the door (aka Managing a website project) which will be a non-code talk about the realities of project management in a small web development company where the PM overhead has to be minimal, but effective.

ZendCon last year was a great conference and this year's is shaping up to be equally as good, if not better. I recommend that you persuade your employer to send you. It'll be money well spent - especially if you register before 28th August and get the discount.

The Dutch PHP Conference is over and so it's time to write a short wrap-up.

Day 1

The conference was opened by a cool animated video and then Cal Evans welcomed us, with a nice short speech. The keynote was given by Andrei Zmievski of Digg. Andrei is a core devloper and gave an interesting overview of what we can expect to see next in PHP.

I then listened to Paul Reinheimer talk about some problems you can encounter in conceptually easy situations. I found the section about handling account login issues very interesting and it's an area that I now intend to improve in my code. Ben Ramsey followed with a talk on the theory of REST architectures which was interesting, though not directly relevant to anything that we're doing at the moment. Making sure that I understand it when we come to make web service APIs is important though.

After lunch Matthew Weier O'Phinney talked about contributing to open source projects. Matthew gave a great talk with useful information in it. As a contributor to Zend Framework already, I mainly used this talk to learn how to evangelise the concept of contributing to other people.

I stepped out of the next session into the hallway track where I caught up with some people and then checked my email. Then Jan Lehnardt was on to talk about CouchDB. CouchDB fascinates me as it's so different from the relational databases I'm used to. I don't see that we'll be using it soon though - the paradigm shift is significant.

The day ended with the speakers dinner followed by drinking :)

Day 2

Day 2 dawned bright and far too early and I managed to leave my power adapter at the hotel, so I had to go back for it, missing the opening keynote. I got back to see most of Eli White's talk on scaling. Eli is a good speaker and the talk was well researched. I know that if I ever need to scale a website to 20 database servers and too many web servers, then I'm going to try and head hunt him...

I was intending to see Juliette Reinders Folmer's talk on UTF-8, but Paul suffered from a video adapter failure and so I lent him my laptop and stayed to watch and make sure he didn't break it. Paul gave another interesting talk whilst looking good in his suit.

After lunch, it was my turn to talk. Although I was nervous at the beginning, I think that I got into my stride and the presentation went well with intelligent questions asked by the audience. I think it helped that I advised the people who knew more than I did to leave before we started :) If you were there and haven't yet rated it, then please leave feedback!

The final breakout session that I attended was another by Ben Ramsey about HTTP. There was more here that was directly relevant to work, but I'd have preferred more on the codes side with less emphasis on the methods.

The session was closed with a conversation between Cal Evans, Ivo Jansch, Andrei Zmievski, Lorna Mitchell and Paul Reinheimer. This took the form of an interview by Cal and Ivo with their guests. It worked quite well, but I felt that the questions for Andrei and Paul were not as well structured as the ones for Lorna. There was a slide show running above their heads with Twitter and Flickr photos from the conference playing. This was very funny :)

In the evening, I went for a meal at a Pancake house that was very enjoyable and I got to see a little bit of Central Amsterdam!

Conclusion

Overall, The 2009 version of the Dutch PHP Conference was very successful. It's clear that it is being positioned to become a major conference, not just for Europe, but for the world with a significant focus on the advanced developer.

I will certainly be submitting to talk in 2010 - assuming I can think up some advanced topics to talk about!

The Dutch PHP Conference is being held in mid-June in Amsterdam and I'm speaking at it! My talk is called Caching for performance and in it I'll be looking at how to use caching to improve the performance of a website.

I decided to talk about this topic is that it's something that our customers have started asking about. I've started getting questions from clients asking how we can increase the speed of the their website without increasing the hosting charges. Generally, the solutions we've been looking at are to use caching at various levels to decrease the time spent creating the page. We've been interested in speeding up the response time of the site rather than worrying about scaling as most of our sites are B2B where volume of users is rarely a problem, but the time to get the page rendered is.

On the principle that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I thought that I'd share what we've learned. You should come along and say hi! I promise not to (over) plug my Zend Framework book!

Another PHPUK conference is over and again it was a good'un! There were a lot of good talks, though not all were targeted at me and I also got to meet old friends and make new ones.

The day started well with probably the most inventive safety announcement ever by Marcus, though he should use a microphone next time! Aral Balkan's keynote provided food for thought and he's a very enthusiastic speaker. This was an excellent up-beat talk which raised my general happiness with the day. Although I went to David Soria Parra's talk on sharding, I didn't find it very useful as it's not a problem I'm likely to come across. I would have preferred to have seen some more real-world use-cases too. Similarly, David Axmark's talk on Drizzle is also something I'm unlikely to be using in the next year. However, being aware of technologies that are coming up is one reason why I come to conferences and I'll be watching Drizzle's progress with interest.

After an excellent lunch, there were two talks on Symfony, so I skipped those :) Simultaneously, there was also a talk about PHP on Windows and Flex which I also skipped. During this time, I took advantage of the quietness of the exhibitor area to grab an SQL Server guru at the Microsoft stand. He provided me with some useful information that if it works like I expect, will more than save me the cost of the conference ticket.

The final talk I went to was by Chris Shiflett who explored the effect of the way we humans think on providing secure applications. Along with being entertaining, it also provided some key points about security without being yet another talk on how to avoid CRSF or SQL injections.

There were two socials for the event and both were excellent opportunities to meet people and catch up. I very much enjoyed it all and am now looking forward to the Dutch PHP Conference.

If you're going to the PHPUK conference on Friday, please say hello if you see me!

The schedule is out now, so you can plan the talks you want to see.