PHP UK Conference 2007

I’ve just come back from the PHP UK Conference (2007) held in London. It was a one day event with five speakers. I took a few photos, but most didn’t come out too well as ISO 400 sucks on my camera!

Cal Evans introduced us to mash ups and the pain of getting an API key from UPS! Simon Laws talked about SCA which was new to me and I thought it was a very clever idea. Kevlin Henney gave us a tour of the core ideas in Object Orientation which was fascinating and eye opening. Rasmus gave us a whistle stop tutorial on performance, security and PHP5 and then the day ended with a discussion on the design of interactive systems for everyday life by Bill Gaver.

I met up with people from the West Midlands PHP User Group; All of Pale Purple were down and I also met up with Darren from Siftware and Greg from Senokian. I also got to “network” and spoke to people from Zend, Yahoo! and a dozen other companies!

It was also great to meet Dagfinn Reiersøl who has just finished writing PHP in Action which looks to be an excellent book for the intermediate to advanced PHP developer. (Disclaimer: I’m currently writing a book for Manning, so I could be biased…) I first came across Dagfinn on the PHP Application Design forum on Sitepoint where his posts are always informative and worth reading. There are so few books out there that are aimed at those of us that already know PHP, that PHP in Action should do very well. Chapter 1 is a free download from Manning’s website and part 1 of chapter 7 is available from the Zend Devzone. Check it out!

If you didn’t go to the UK PHP Conference this year, make sure that you go next year!