Rob Allen's DevNotes

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.

PHPNW 08 took place last Saturday, and even though I wasn't too well, I had a great time.

I thought my talk went okay, and judging from the feedback, at least some people learnt something from it which is good. I hope that the tongue-in-cheek references to my book were taken in the light-hearted manner intended. The conference seemed well-attended and the organisation was top-notch. Jeremy, Jenny, Emma, Lorna and everyone else involved did a fantastic job.

At both socials, I met some excellent people who were generous enough to let me be my usual opinionated self and so I learnt as much at the socials as I did in the sessions.

One side effect of being ill is that I didn't take many photos. The few I did take are up on Flickr.

The slides for my talk are up on slideshare too:

From one conference to another one. On the 22nd November 2008, the PHPNW08 conference in Manchester takes place and I'm speaking!

My talk is entitled "First steps with Zend Framework" and it will cover an introduction to ZF and then walk through building an MVC application using the Zend Framework.

There are lots of interesting talks scheduled so far. They look aimed at a wide and I want to see every one.

If you are in the UK in November, you should come along.

I'm now back from ZendCon which was the most intense conference I've ever been too. I arrived late Saturday evening and after dropping off the stuff at my hotel, I walked the mile or so to the conference hotel to meet up with some #phpc people. I didn't stay in the Hyatt as it was too expensive for me. The walk took a little longer than I expected as I kept walking the wrong way, but I eventually worked out where I was going and it ended up being quite easy in the end. $8 for a beer at the Hyatt was a bit steep though!

On Sunday I met up with Lorna from IBuildings for breakfast and then we headed to the conference hotel to meet up with lots of people. We split into two groups with Derick, Cal, Marcus and myself heading to Napa for wine tasting and purchasing. The others headed to the mall and a theme park. Napa is the other side of San Francisco and it took a couple of hours to get there. I really enjoyed the day - especially seeing the wine cellars. We went to a Mexican restaurant on Sunday evening for food and beer.

Monday was tutorial day and after registration I header for Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Mike Naberezny's Best Practices tutorial. This talk covered a lot of ground about stuff I mostly knew, but I picked up some hints and tips that I'll see if we can add into our workflow back in the office. After lunch, I went to Sebastian Bergmann's Quality Assurance tutorial. Sebastian is the author of PHPUnit and he showed off some of the new stuff in version 3.3 which he released just prior to the talk. Obviously, I immediately upgraded that day!

Zend held a party for ZCEers in the evening which was great fun. They had pizza and alcohol - what more could you want?! After the party, a group of us headed out to hit some bars. I couldn't tell you where we went as someone else drove! We went to a couple of different bars. In the first one, a band was playing and I borrowed Zack's SB-600 flashgun which is awesome. I have so got to get myself one of those. We then moved on to another bar where much pool was played.

Tuesday was the first day of the conference proper and was the start of an intense couple of days. Breakfast was provided from 7:30 with the first keynote starting at 8:30. The keynote, given by Harold and Andi of Zend, covered what Zend was doing in PHP including announcing a partnership with Adobe and a new version of Zend Studio. It was quite a marketing talk and so didn't seem aimed at me and I wasn't really paying that much attention. We then started the talks where I started learning stuff :) Jay Pipes of MySQL talked about SQL tuning which was very informative and I have notes to go through some of our queries and fix them! I then went to Juliette's Uncon discussion about women in IT which was interesting. I firmly believe that we'll see more women in IT when mothers start influencing their daughters in the same way that we now have many women in medicine, but didn't 30 years ago. It's quite depressing hearing about the way some women are treated in their workplace though. I'd hit the roof if such behaviour was happening in my office...

I stayed in the Uncon with Jason's Zend Framework modules talk. It was interesting to see how he went about creating a distributable module for ZF as this is an area that is not well covered. I think that there's much work to do there before we see many ZF modules though. His thoughts on Doctrine were also interesting and I should check it out at some point. Back into the main sessions, I went to Eli White's "Knight Rider" talk. This was a funny talk as he was playing Knight Rider clips from the 80s whilst talking about tools to help with software development. I didn't get much from this talk as it was too high level for me.

I then headed over for some C-fu from Sara Golemon who talked about extension writing. Although beset with technical difficulties, I learnt quite a bit in this session. It surprised me that extension writing didn't seem that hard. The final session for the day for me was Matthew's talk on Zend_Form and Dojo. I've been heads down in editing and work recently so haven't had a chance to look at the new Dojo stuff, so this was a good opportunity to catch up. Matthew's work is really impressive as he's abstracted it all away into a set of components that just work. This is especially noticeable in the form components.

After the last talk, there was drinks and snacks in the exhibition hall. I had a walk around and collected two cuddly monkeys for the kids from Remy :) I then went to dinner (at another Mexican) with the guys and gals on the ZF Certification team. This was a really nice meal and we also celebrated Ralph's birthday.

On Wednesday, the morning keynote was about Magento, so I skipped it and caught up with work email and checked in with work to ensure that all was going okay. Elizabeth Smith gave an excellent talk about all the bits in PHP 5 that we should all be using nowadays and emphasised that we should use built-in functions and extensions in preference to rolling our own code in PHP. This was one of the few talks where I took notes and need to investigate php_check_syntax(), scandir() and file_put_contents(). I then checked out Alex Russell's talk about Dojo where he explained why Dojo is the way it is as well as showing some examples of how to use it. In the questions afterwards he pointed out the Dojo's module that does what JQuery does is approximately the same size and although there's a lot in Dojo, you can pick and choose what you need and don't have to pay a big download or performance penalty for stuff you aren't using.

In the afternoon, I found myself exclusively at the Uncon talks - Keith Casey really did a good job! Ed Finkler started the afternoon talking about AIR applications. This was very interesting as I knew nothing about them and learnt quite a bit. Note to self: never use eval() in JS either! Staying in the same room, Terry Chay was next up with a talk about when to use frameworks and when not to. This was an interesting talk with the main message being to think about the consequences of your decisions as nothing is free. I then had to swap rooms to the other Uncon room to learn about PHP-GTK and using PHP on the desktop. Like AIR, This is an area that I'm not familiar, so I got a lot out of it. I also liked the less formal atmosphere in the uUncon sessions. The final session of the day was Matthew and Lorna's Uncon talk on subversion tips and tricks. Both Lorna and Matthew are good speakers and I picked up some knowledge that I'm going to need for our migration from CVS to subversion. It's interesting that most of the tips applied to any version control system and they could probably emphasise this more in future talks.

In the evening Yahoo! had a party in the Hyatt. It was slightly odd as you had to get a ticket for one drink and then had to pay for any more. The weirdest thing was that the hotel bar was cheaper! As a result, we headed downstairs to the hotel bar and Derick drank lots of Margeritas!

Thursday, the final day of the conference was a half-day. I went to a case-study about Zero 9's use of Zend Framework and Zend Platform and then went to the "What's new in PHP 5.3" talk. This was a panel discussion where the funniest bit was when Marcus Boerger stated "There is no goto" whilst passing his hand over us. In other words, the goto statement that's been added to PHP 5.3 is for specialised usage, not for general use. The final keynote was in two parts. Mark de Visser of Zend provided an overview of the conference and thanked all the participants. David Neff of the American Cancer Society then talked about how they were using PHP to build their video sharing talk. It was high level, but nevertheless very well presented and engaging.

After the conference ended, a good number of us popped over to a local In 'n' Out burger place for some food before heading back to the bar at the Hyatt to while away the afternoon. Good conversation was had during this time as everyone was relaxed and didn't need to rush off to (or give) a session. Derick, Zack and Liz even spent some time in the pool! We gave ZendCon a final send off with a meal at Morton's steak house. This was an excellent meal, if a little pricy... next time no doubt, we'll go to a Mexican!

I had a excellent time and talked to many great people. My thanks to everyone who put up with my company; I hope I didn't bore you too much.