Wow, what a week ZendCon 08 was! I know a conference was good when I am just too tired to move after it. Last Friday after it was all over, I spent most of the day recuperating. It was so great, I really don’t know where to start.

Since so many people have written their thoughts already it just doesn’t make sense for me to rehash everything they have said. Instead, let me point you to a few of the blogs I’ve read.

In writing his ZendCon wrapup, Keith Casey, this year’s ZendCon UnCon Program Chair person had this to say:

...the sheer number of sessions and their overall quality was great. When I walk away from a session, I have a simple metric “Did I learn something that will help me work better?” I can honestly say that I could answer “yes” out of almost every session. The stand outs were Jay Pipes’ “SQL Query Tuning: The Legend of Drunken Query Master”, Eli White’s “The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development”, Ed Finklers’ “Where AIR blows”, and Terry Chay’s “Making Frameworks Suck Less”. Jay and Terry introduced some ideas that made me consider a different angle on a regular problem while Eli shared some tips on some tools that will make my life easier.

Chris Shifflet, speaker, security expert and Principal at OmniTI had this to say on his blog about ZendCon:

Although ZendCon has a reputation for being business-focused, there’s a strong community presence. I’ve been a community advocate since before PHPC began, and I still derive the most value from the hallway track.

Lorna Mitchell, the correspondent for phpwomen.org wrote two posts about her ZendCon experiences, ZendCon Days 0 and 1 and ZendCon Days 2 and 3. Her conclusion was:

ZendCon is one of the biggest events of the year, and brings some excellent opportunities to attend the technical talks and the networking sessions alike. For me it was my first trip to the US and also the first time I had been to a conference this size, so it was rather daunting, but I had a great time, learned a lot, and met new friends that I will continue to stay in touch with. The conference ran very smoothly throughout and I think it can be considered a great success.

Ibuildings posted several ZendCon wrap-ups from their various attendees on their corporate blog. They posted so much that no single quote can wrap-up their experience. However it does seem like they enjoyed themselves.

Elizabeth Marie Smith talks about her experience speaking at ZendCon this year on her blog wrap-up of ZendCon 08

My favorite talk of the conference, the one I enjoyed the most, was actually the unconference talk. I did end up doing a little song and dance about PHP-GTK, a project I work on that allows PHP to be used for desktop apps.

Susan Gantner and Jon Paris posted their thoughts about ZendCom from a System i perspective. They had several nice surprises to discuss including this one from Jon.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the PHP folks we met were very business focused. This was not the care-free bunch of code cowboys that the enterprise Java folks like to paint PHP programmers. These were serious students of the programmer’s art, who were every bit as involved in using techniques such as Frameworks at the core of their applications as the Java folks. That is not to say that they didn’t know how to have fun—witness the Yahoo -sponsored party on the Wednesday evening. We don’t recall having seen anyone break dancing at a COMMON conference! At the end of the day, it seems to us that the main difference between the Java aficionados and the PHP folks is that the PHPers will more quickly abandon architectural “purity” in the interests of getting the job done. One of many similarities that we continue to find between PHP programmers and RPGers.

The team over at NC State University wrote several posts during the week. They apparently had fun as two of their members are now sporting the new ZFCE badge on their Our Team page. Here’s a quote from their closing thoughts.

I think one of the area’s where Zend improved was in the Un-Con (shout out to Keith Casey, who put the Un-Con together). One of the best talks I heard came from there (Terry Chay’s curse-laden rant on Rails and frameworks).

As you can see from these quotes almost everyone had a great time. If you were in attendance, take the time to visit a few of these blogs and share your own favorite ZendCon moments.

One of the great things about the PHP community is that any time we get together, there are lots of pictures. ZendCon 08 was no exception. As of this writing there are over 1,600 pictures from members of the PHP community at or around ZendCon. Here’s a link to the ZendCon Flickr Feed.

Finally, the two most asked questions I get are “Slides” and “Audio”? I will be compiling an official slides page for DevZone this week, I’ve got about 1/3 of them so far. If you are in a hurry, here are two links. First, all the ones I have so far are on slideshare.net tagged as zendcon08. Additionally, there is an unofficial list of the available ZendCon slides. As for audio, we recorded all the main sessions and will be releasing them as part of our ZendCon Sessions podcast.

I know I say this each year but each year its true, this year’s ZendCon was the best ever! Chris Shiflett made a great point in his quote above, the real value of ZendCon is the hallway track. That is not to minimize the value of the content in the sessions. The sessions we will post online for all to review though, to participate in the hallway track you have to be there. Next year, I expect you see you there in the halls with us.

Many thanks to Rob Allen, Chris Cornutt, and Lorna Mitchell for allowing me to use their great photos.