ZendCon Day 1

ZendCon is in full swing! We’ve got keynotes, we’ve got sessions, we’ve (finally) got Internet! Read up on all the happenings!Harold Goldberg, with help from Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski kicked things off with their opening keynote “Unlocking the Value”. Harold, Andi and Zeev, with help from both IBM and Microsoft, showed that PHP, which now runs 1/3 of the Internet, can be used to Unlock, Extend, Exploit, and Leverage existing data and applications. I go to a lot of conferences and watch a lot of keynote speeches and I am proud to say that the Harold’s keynote was the best I’ve seen in a long time. They even had some funny jokes in there. (and one only has to look back to OSCON to see what a disaster it can be when a manager tries to be funny at a tech conference!)

After the opening keynote, Terry Chay presented in “Internet is an Ogre” talk in the main room while John Coggeshall presented “Enterprise PHP: Cross Section of a real Implementation” along with Marc Urbaitel to a packed house.

Speaking of packed houses, most of the sessions I’ve stuck my head into have been packed out. In one of the tutorials, I opened the door and a guy fell out backwards! There are a lot of good sessions, there just aren’t a lot of empty sessions.

No conference is complete without a good old snafu and we had at least one today. The Internet connection took a nose dive and locked the IBM presenters out when they were trying to present QEDWiki. Thanks to their patience and diligence, we were able to get the demo at the end of the keynote after things had been restored. After lunch, the Internet connection gremlins seem to have disappeared for the most part.

Patrick Reilly of OmniTI is doing a great job of managing the ZendCon UnCon. Sebastian Bergman presented this afternoon on PHPUnit among others and even the Zend Management Team got into the act when Siddarth Agarwal, the Vice President of Americas Field Operations presented what he calls “Tylenol for your PHP Headaches”.

Tonight is the Exhibit Hall Reception Including Happy Hour 2.0.

Keep watching flickr and technorati for all the ZendCon coverage.