Rob Allen's DevNotes

A couple of weeks ago, the 2011 PHP Benelux conference was held near Antwerp. This was the first time that I've been to this conference and I was very impressed by it. I presented two sessions that seemed to go down well which was nice.

I travelled to Belgium with Ryan Mauger on Thursday and we had a poor journey that took around 12 hours to get there. Our first flight (10:45) was cancelled, and then the second flight (16:45) was delayed until 20:15 or so. On the plus side, I got to spend all day in the bar with Bittarman!

On arrival at Brussels, the famous PHPBenelux hospitality kicked in as Michelangelo was waiting for us to give us a lift to the hotel. I had heard about how hospitable this conference was to their speakers and having now experienced it, I can confirm that their reputation is well deserved. As a result of the travel problems, I missed the speakers' dinner, but managed to get in a drink (or two!) in the bar.

Friday, the first day of the conference, was tutorials first appeared well attended. I spent a bit of time in the morning going over my deployment presentation which was useful. The conference started at 1pm with a keynote by Lorna and Ivo. This was a good keynote providing many ideas on how to become a better developer and I took away a number of ideas that I need to explore. I was then up with Stress-free deployment which I enjoy giving as adding a deployment strategy to our company was so beneficial that I like to tell everyone! The rest of the afternoon also had interesting talks and I need to call out David Zülke's talk on REST which was very helpful.

After the closing keynote, there was a social in the hotel bar which was well attended and I got to talk to many interesting people and again, stayed up much too late!

Day 2 dawned bright and sunny and I managed to miss the first session whilst catching up with email. I did get to Scott's talk on HipHop and then I was up with a look at what's new in ZF 2. I didn't manage to get across my enthusiasm for ZF 2 as well as I should have though and will do better in future as ZF 2 is going to be great! I visited the hallway track after lunch and watched several people clone Joind.in and start looking at bugs which was exciting. Keith Casey was then up with a look at project triage which was a fascinating insight into how to get a handle on a "legacy" project and turn it into something to be proud off.

The conference was closed by Elizabeth's keynote on community. Elizabeth is an enthusiastic and inspiring speaker and I'm very proud to be part of the PHP community and will do my bit to keep it strong! Obviously, after the conference, we put this into practice with a meal and then a few more drinks in the bar...

PHPUK, the conference organised by the PHP London usergroup is being held on Friday 25th February 2011. If you haven't bought your ticket yet, then you should!

I'll be there talking about optimising a Zend Framework application, which should be interesting. I'm going to be looking at what's slow in the ZF code itself and have been profiling using xhprof which is the first time I've used it. It's quite good, once you have it set up :)

There are a lot of good talks at PHPUK this year and I'm particularly looking forward to Thijs Feryn's Varnish in Action and Jonathan Weiss' Running on Amazon EC2. Check out the full list of talks.

If you are going, then come and say hello.

I'm delighted to be able to announce that I'm speaking at the PHPBenelux Conference on 28 & 29 January 2011 in Antwerp, Belgium. This is a community run conference organised by the PHPBenelux user group and given the list of speakers, I'm expecting to learn a lot.

The full list of talks is on their website and shows that this is going to be a great conference. I'll be giving a talk that will introduce Zend Framework 2 and look why it has been created and what's different compared to ZF1. Other speakers include Nick Belhomme talking about namespaces, Markus Franz on Doctrine and Mike van Riel on SCRUM. There will even be a few of our friends from across the pond with Keith Casey talking about handling large unfamiliar codebases and Paul Jones talking about benchmarking.

If you can make it to Belgium in January, grab one of the early bird tickets. and plan to learn much!

The PHPNW Conference is an annual conference held in Manchester, now in its 3rd year and again I was invited to speak. The organisation of PHPNW was top-notch as usual with everything running smoothly from my point of view. I'm sure there were a few hectic moments for the organisers though :)

The day started with Lorna's keynote on how to improve your skill set as a team. This was a great talk which sparked a number of ideas for me and no doubt many others there.

I spoke on the upcoming Zend Framework 2.0 this time and judging from the comments on the joind.in, I covered the topic well. If you were at the talk and haven't rated, I'd appreciate it if you could jot down your thoughts on what I did well and what I did badly, so I can improve. The slides are also available on my talks page.

I particularly enjoyed Marco's talk on the systems that run php|architect which looked at how they have organised their code into separate systems that makes it easier to swap different bits out as required. I then joined the "ZF track" with Rowan's talk on Zend_Acl which was comprehensive with particularly good examples! I then caught Juozas' talk on Optimising Zend Framework which was a high level look at the issues within ZF1 that make it slower that we'd like.

The final session of the day was the Framework Shootout chaired by Marcus Deglos. I joined the panel with David, Sam and Derick and answered questions from Marcus. David did, of course, steal the show as he's a highly entertaining, knowledgable speaker with a great sense of humour.

All in all, an excellent day with a good second day at MOSI, though I only managed to see Thijs' talk on PHP from a hoster's perspective which was entertaining and informative.

I'm looking forward to PHPNW 11 already!

My friend Cal Evans is putting on a virtual conference called Day Camp 4 Developers. The most interesting thing about this conference is that it is about the "soft skills" that you need as a developer. There are many conferences that deal withe the technical skills improvements that you need, but less that handle the rest of your job, so this piqued my interest.

It's a one day tech-agnostic conference containing 5 sessions and all you need is an Internet connection. Good choice of speakers too: Josh Holmes, Elizabeth Naramore, Scott Gordon, Brian Prince and Lorna Mitchell.

Details

Date: Saturday, November 6th
Price: $35 per person ($30 in groups of 10 or more)
Where: On-Line (gotowebinar.com)

What's also cool is that all sessions will be recorded and available for you to review at your leisure. Of course, if you're busy that day, then you can buy a ticket and get the videos anyway to listen to at a later date. Apparently, you'll be able to buy the session recordings after the event, but at a price premium, so probaly worth just getting a ticket and not (virtually!) turning up on the day :)

You can buy a ticket directly via eventbrite now and be sure of your place!