Rob Allen's DevNotes

The PHPNW conference is coming to Manchester again this year on the 9th October 2010 and I'm going to be speaking!

With a nod to the future, I'm going to be talking about Zend Framework 2.0. I'll be talking about why there will be a ZF2 and what's going to be coming up with the release.

PHPNW is a great conference and this year has expanded to three tracks! It's only £58 too if you book before 4th September. There's lot of ZF content too along with plenty of other great talks covering all aspects of PHP development.

If you are in the UK this October, make sure you come along!

This year I was invited to speak at DPC 2010 which was a great conference. I've published to Flickr, my complete set of photos from DPC 10.

Arriving on Wednesday, the day before the conference, I managed to get to meet up with my friend Juliette, along with a some of the other speakers for a barbeque which was a lot of fun. We ate, we drank (lots) and possibly this pose by Chris was the most surreal picture I took that evening!

On tutorial day, I gave a Zend Framework tutorial with Matthew Weier O'Phinney which seemed to go down quite well. We took a different approach this year to the previous ones that Matthew has given in that we talked about different application patterns and components that you can use in your ZF application; rather going through building an application from scratch. This had the benefit that we could talk about stuff that we wouldn't have got to normally. There were some other excellent tutorials that I was sorry to miss; I'm not quite sure how the attendees were able to make up their minds!

The conference was opened by Lorna and then Kevlin gave the opening keynote speaking about 97 things every programmer should know. This was an excellent keynote which fired us up for the day. In the morning, I gave my presentation on Zend_Form which I didn't feel came across quite as well as I could have done. I should probably revisit the content and pack some other bits in. This talk clearly showed the difficulties of aiming a presentation at the audience's level as I had some people there who had never used Zend_Form and others who knew it and were looking for more nitty-gritty details. Maybe I didn't set their expectations correctly at the start.

There were many other excellent presentations on the first day an I managed to catch Johannes' talk, 'Under PHP's hood' about what goes on within the PHP engine. An excellent talk with content that I highly recommend every PHP developer learns. I finished the day listening to Cal talk about Flex and whilst he hasn't convinced me to go that route, I know actually know a little about what it actually is!

In the evening, I had dinner with the other speakers and then we went to the conference social hosted by Ibuildings and github. This was very well attended and I had several good conversations with people.

The second day of the conference started with a keynote by Chris Shifflet about Security patterns. I had already seen this talk and it was just as fascinating seeing it again. Definitely lots to think about. I gave my last talk of the conference immediately after the keynote and spoke on Deployment. I felt that this talk went well and that most of the audience got something out of it.

In a break from technical content, I went to see Elizabeth's talk on technical writing. Whilst I consider myself competent, I learnt lots and managed to not embarrass myself too much during the interactive section when I was volunteered (thanks Chris!) to go up and help Elizabeth illustrate a point. I also managed to drop in on the uncon and see Juozas and Ben talk about Doctrine 2, which seems to be considerably better than D1. The conference ended with a panel of leading lights in the PHP world talking about PHP and where it's headed.

After conference ended, I went with a number of other people to a pancake restaurant and had an excellent meal, followed by a drink (or two!) with friends in the hotel bar. I had joked earlier in the evening that the bar bill would end up being paid by whomever was left standing at closing time... mdgm and myself had that honour :)

Again, DPC 2010 was a great conference and I want to thank Lorna and the DPC crew again for inviting me.

TekX (pronounced Tek-Ten) has finished and we've all gone back to our respective daily lives. I had a blast and learnt a thing or two as well... I've also been a little busy, which is why this post is "late".

The week started on Saturday when I flew to Chicago from Manchester. Rather helpfully, tek was held at a hotel close enough to the airport, that the hotel had a free shuttle. As a tip for next year, you need to phone the hotel to come and collect you if you don't land at the terminal next to the train station.

On Sunday, Lorna, Derick and myself went to Chicago city centre; apparently, this is known as "downtown". We were intending to do a river boat trip, however that was all booked up, so we ended up grabbing lunch; having a look around Millennium Park and then doing a walking tour with the Chicago Architecture Foundation. This turned out to be an excellent tour. The lady was extremely knowledgeable and shared her knowledge freely. it was a very enjoyable afternoon and I feel that I know much more about Chicago's history now.

I ended up working much more than I expected over the week, however, I did manage to make nearly all the sessions I wanted to. Due to a scheduling conflict, I missed Kristina's tutorial on MongoDB as I was giving a Zend Framework tutorial at the same time! My tutorial seemed to be appreciated and I hope that those attending learnt something new. It was an introduction to Zend Framework, starting from first principles; in Amsterdam next week, at the Dutch PHP Conference, Matthew and I will be doing an all-day tutorial covering the next level of Zend Framework usage.

Josh Holmes opened the conference proper with his Simplicity keynote. I've had the privilege of seeing this at PHPUK earlier this year, however, a second listen was appreciated. Josh showed us his theatre background when the mic failed by continuing to talk and projecting his voice all the way to the back of the room. I gave my talk on Zend_Form next, which also seemed to help people learn a little more about the component. As there's probably more confusion over decorators than anything else, I concentrated on them, which may have made them clearer for those who saw it.

I don't want to provide a run down of all the talks as exploring the joind.in page will tell you more than I could here. I do want to highlight a few though. Lorna's talk on Subversion and DVCSs was the most objective and balanced discussion on an emotive topic. I had seen an earlier version at my local user group and Lorna really pulled out all the stops at Tek to give the best session I've seen her give. Having missed her tutorial, I made sure that I went to Kristina's talk on MongoDB. I've heard some rumblings in the Twitter stream about Mongo, but didn't actually know anything about it before her talk. It is always a pleasure to listen to an expert who is passionate about her subject. Talking about passionate, Elizabeth's talk on cross-platform PHP was a study in how you don't need many slides if (a) you are angry and (b) slightly hungover and so are prepared to rant! I thought I knew all the pitfalls of developing PHP sites for both nix and Windows, but Liz managed to point out a few more to think about.

Tek is a very community oriented conference and it did feel that there was an open atmosphere where talking to each other was encouraged. This is known as the "hallway track" and I found it very beneficial, managing to get some useful conversations with people who know far more than I do. This definitely increased my knowledge and hopefully those who talked to me also gained. I also managed to get some time with Chris "phpdeveloper" Cornutt who helped me get the joind.in source code working on my computer so that I can help the project by fixing the bits that annoy me the most :)

Finally, I'd like to thank Marco, Cal, Keith, Arbi and Beth for hosting an excellent conference and inviting me to speak at it. Hopefully, I'll be able to go next year too!

I mentioned back in January that I'll be speaking at TEK.X in Chicago next month. Since then I've fleshed out the talks that I'll be giving and think they should be quite interesting. It turns out that Zend_Form is such a large topic that I could probably speak for 3 hours on it! As a result, I've concentrated on providing a overview of the component and how to use it followed by a look at how to change the text of error messages and how decoration works.

The main reason for this post though is that Cal Evans has been doing some 5 minute interviews with some of the speakers at TEK this year. I recommend that you have a listen and find out a little about the people who are worth paying attention to.

As you can see on the schedule, I'm speaking in some very august company in Chicago this year, so highly recommend that you badger your boss and get a ticket to be there with us.

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 more technical content. Hopefully, I'll be able to explain Zend_Form well enough that people will understand it too!