PHP London 08

The PHP UK Conference in London is over for another year and this year’s event was another evolutionary improvement on last year’s. It was held in Inmarsat’s conference facilities in the City of London. There were two conference rooms in use: a 300 seat main auditorium and a smaller 75 seat second room. There were also a large social area for food, drinks and networking. I thought it worked really well, kudos to Paul Morgan and the rest of PHPLondon for the organisation.

Lunch!

The day kicked off with a talk by Ivo Jansch on “Enterprise PHP”. Ivo is an engaging speaker and talked about designing and building PHP applications with a more structured approach for long term benefits. After the break, the conference split into two tracks with Scott MacVicar & Mike Sullivan talking about their development experiences and Stefan Esser talking about security. I have to admit that I missed both these talks as I was talking too much with Lorna and Kathryn at the PHPWomen stand. I’ve been “talking” with Lorna on IRC and via blogs for a little while now, and it was great to meet her in person along with Kevin, her other half. They had t-shirts which were snapped up and I got one of the last ones and it wasn’t even lunchtime. (I hope my donation at least covered its cost!) Here’s a picture Dave the codemonkey and an elePHPant wearing a phpwomen t-shirt:

PHPWomen t-shirts

Lunch was excellent too (Beef Stroganof for me) and I caught up with the PHP West Midlands people. We have a meeting in couple of weeks on 11th March, by the way. After lunch Marcus Bointon talked about mail whilst Scott MacVicar talked about SQLite3. Again, I managed to miss this slot, but I understand that both were well received and covered their subject well. The next slot in the main room was the Frameworks comparison with Ian Christian (Symfony), Toby Beresford (CodeIgniter) and myself (Zend Framework). We each had 20 minutes to present a bit about our framework and then there was a Q&A session afterwards. I thought it went okay. I was very nervous whilst speaking and so talked too fast. Fortunately, I had enough slides to cover and finished at the 20 minute mark. Ian and Toby gave very different talks but both covered their respective frameworks strengths. I thought that the Q&A went well and none of us embarrassed ourselves which was nice!

Whilst we were speaking, Zoe Slattery gave a talk on testing PHP and then Anthony Phillips talked about IBM’s Project Zero. I wanted to see both of these, so I’m looking forward to the MP3s that the conference will be providing. The conference was wrapped up by Derick Rethans who talked about how PHP and usage of PHP has changed since he first started working with the language. It was funny and informative and it was interesting that pretty much all the questions afterwards were on testing.

All in all it was a great conference and I’m looking forward to next year’s.