Goodbyes have again been said, suitcases are again overstuffed with swag and once again, I find myself looking back over my should at what was a great conference.

This year’s php|works, put on by my friends at php|architect, was a rousing success. It had everything a great conferences needs, good people, good speakers and a fun atmosphere.

Things got off to a good start on Wednesday with the tutorial day. I don’t normally get to attend in-depth sessions because I’m usually too busy posting articles or reading email; however, I not only attended but thoroughly enjoyed both Paul Reinheimer’s YUI! tutorial and Sebeastian Bergman’s “Testing with PHPUnit and Selenium”. Both sessions were well thought out and well presented. While I’ll stop short of saying “Paul’s Leet”, he did a great job presenting the material. He should, he gets regular practice as the teacher of php|architects online courses.

Thursday, Andrei kicked off the main conference with his keynote, “The Future: PHP 6”. Andrei gave a good overview of where things were headed with the language and threw in a few LOLCATZ slides mixed in to keep things from getting too serious. (not that being too serious is a problem in the PHP community)

The sessions presented at php|works were a good mix of the speakers you expect and some new faces. The regulars included Chris Shiflett, Paul M. Jones and Derick Rethans. One of the new faces speaking at php|works this year was Maggie Nelson of Schematic. Maggie presented two sessions, of which I was able to attend “You Don’t Need a DBA”. She’s a good presenter and I expect to see her at other conferences in the coming years. Maggie works with Brian deShong, Ben Ramsey and crew over at Schematic. (A company that has one of the most bizarre websites I’ve ever seen.)

No good PHP conference is complete without at least one good party. At php|works this year it was sponsored by Microsoft. It was great fun and as always time spent with good friends is time well spent.

Another presenter that I had not yet had the opportunity to see was Ed Finkler. After mis-haps with the airlines, Ed finally arrived and gave two presentations. Like Maggie Nelson, I was only able to attend one of them but Ed was unusual, as always. :) The session I was able to attend was Ed’s Introduction to CodeIgniter. It was an interesting look at that framework. (For those that do not know, in all Ed’s spare time, he does the audio post-production for PHP Abstract)

Finally, the session that I don’t think anyone missed (and you have to feel sorry for Sebastian and Jeff for being in the same time slot with him) was Terry Chay’s “The Internet is an Ogre”. It was classic Chay, excellent points, ripped off movie clips and enough language to make a sailor blush. Terry’s sessions are not for those easily offended. However, if you don’t mind the language, he really does have something to say.

php|works this year highlighted a growing trend for me that I’m sure others have seen. As a conference organizer myself, I’m interested to see how this trend matures and more importantly, how I can capitalize on it. The trend is, of course, that of instant and constant communication. It started with twitter.com of course, many people, including myself, were twittering live during the sessions. Beyond that though, #phpc on irc.freenode.net seems to have become the unofficial php|works channel with those of us attending taking over the conversations for the days of the conference. This constant chatter among attendees ranged from “hey, turn around, I’m right behind you” to debates in real time about what a speaker was saying. Not only were the conference attendees able to participate in the conversation but the entire community could join in. I’ve been to conferences before that had live twittering or a dedicated irc channel but I’ve never seen it take off to this extent. Who knows, maybe next year, we’ll all have to start hosting a temporary freenode.net server at conferences just to support the chatter.

With that, I’ll grab my backpack, don my battered fedora and speed off to the next conference.

=C=