Each year developers are called upon to make an agonizing choice. Each year there are more and more conferences offered on a wide range of interesting topics. Developers have to reach deep into their souls and find the one conference they feel so strongly will further their career that they are willing to beg to attend. Worse yet, they are willing to submit to the proctology exam called an expense report just for the privilege. The choices this year for PHP developers aren’t any easier. I don’t pretend to have any crystal ball that gives me insight on which one is better than any other. (aside from the Zend PHP conference, it goes without saying that I feel that is the social event of the season for professional PHP developers) But I do like to try and find what is happening in the PHP conference arena so you can make a more intelligent decision. Having said all of that, let’s look at O’Reilly’s OSCON coming up next month.

A quick glance at their website gives you all the particulars, I’ll leave it to you to sleuth out time and date. What makes this conference of interest to professional PHP developers though? Let’s take a look.

Poking around on the sessions they have to offer, you can quickly find that they have an entire track for PHP. With a speaker list that includes Rasmus Lerdorf, Luke Welling, Laura Thomson, David Sklar, George Schlossnagle, Adam Trachtenberg, and Chris Shiflett, this looks to be a powerhouse conference. Just so you don’t have to go look them up, here’s a rundown of the PHP related session topics.

  • Power PHP Testing – Chris Shiflett, Geoffrey Young
  • Introduction to Object oriented Programming with PHP – Marcus Borger
  • High Performance PHP – George Schlossnagle
  • Essential PHP Security – Chris Shiflett
  • Building an Asynchronous Multiuser Web App for Fun … and Maybe Profit – Luke Welling, Laura Thomson
  • Dirty Secrets of PHP 5’s Ext/SOAP Extension – Adam Trachtenberg
  • PHP Lightning Talks – George Schlossnagle
  • PHP 6 & Unicode: The Tower of Babel, Next Generation – Andrei Zmievski
  • PDO: PHP Data Objects – Wez Furlong
  • PHP and Web 2.0 – Rasmus Lerdorf
  • PHP Security Testing – Chris Shiflett
  • Writing Maintainable Code with PHP – Laura Thomson
  • Understanding ZFramework – John Coggeshall
  • The Underpants Gnomes Strategy Guide: An eCards Case Study – Terry Chay
  • Writing Your Own PHP Extensions: How & Why from A-Z – Jeremy Johnstone
  • Practical PHP Patterns – George Schlossnagle

Wow, a lineup that has heavy hitters and witty titles, truly impressive.

More information can be found on their website. If you do plan to attend, look me up while you are there. I’ll be the one in the tattered fedora and the silly grin.

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