ZendCon Wrapup

As I write this, it’s Sunday. I’m sitting here in the lobby of the San Jose Doubletree Hotel. All signs of the Zend PHP Conference and Expo have been eradicated as new conferences move through. However, I can still hear the voices of friends new and old echo through the lobby. For me, it was a wonderful conference and a chance to catch up with old friends wile making new ones. Now that I’ve had a chance to relax and gather my thoughts, let’s glance back over the shoulder before packing up for the next conference.

Monday

Monday started off great with the tutorials. As usual, I didn’t get to spend much time in any of them but I did get to sit for a while in Matthew Weier O’Phinney and Mike Naberenzy’s session on Best Practices It was a great session and if you weren’t able to attend, I recommend that you visit their blogs and grab the slides.

That’s not to slight the other tutorial teachers. I heard great things about each and every one of them. I wish I had had more time to spend with them but alas, I had other duties to attend to.

Monday night ended in a party for the speakers and any Zend Certified Engineers in attendance. While the pizza was available most of the time, there was always beer and wine to be had. At the party, I got to meet an author of one of the books I’m currently reviewing, Elliot White. Elliot works at digg.com and along with Jonathan D. Eisenhamer wrote PHP 5 in Practice.

Tuesday

Tuesday broke bright and beautiful for those who didn’t over do it at Monday night’s party and the conference was officially under way. Things kicked off with Andi and Zeev giving a keynote described as “their second ‘state-of-the-union’, covering developments at Zend, in the PHP community, at Zend customers, and lots more.” (For those of you just joining the party, Andi and Zeev founded Zend, Zend pays the bills at DevZone.) Among other interesting points in their presentation were 2 gems, one that made great waves in the PHP community and one that is still being analyzed. Of course the big news is that Zend and Microsoft have formed a partnership to make Windows a stable and serious platform for PHP development. Andi summed it up best on his blog .

The goal of this technical collaboration is to make PHP on Windows a first class citizen. It has always been our goal to make PHP run well on any platform, and this initiative reinforces that. Both companies have also observed huge interest both from the community and our respective customers bases in good PHP support on Windows, and therefore, collaborating on making this happen is a no-brainer for both.

The news that did not get the coverage I think it deserved was the new product “announcement”: of ZendBox. ZendBox (which has the cool tagline of “Think inside the box”) is “a fully support & managed, hosted dedicated server with the complete Zend PHP 5 Stack pre-installed”. Ok, but beneath that bit of market-speak is a cool concept. ZendBox is a combination of a hosting provider setting up the server hardware and Zend setting up the software. The result is a fully managed and supported development platform. Here’s a quick quote from the website.

ZendBox is a fully hosted and managed dedicated server running the latest Zend PHP 5 Technology stack, including Zend Core, Zend Framework and Zend Platform. ZendBox provides a complete and easy to deploy solution for the operation and management of business-critical PHP applications.

You can find more information at the ZendBox site and even pre-register for your own ZendBox.

Tuesday continued with a great panel on “How Do the Stacks Stack Up?”. Moderator Steve O’Grady did a great job or posing questions to the panelist about the different aspects of the most popular deployment stacks for PHP.

After the panel, the day slipped into the normal pattern of ZendCon, good session after good session followed by a good session. The pattern of great technical sessions was broken after lunch by the second keynote of the day. Chris Anderson is the Editor-in -Chief of Wired magazine and the author of the book The Long Tail. he gave a great talk and took a few questions afterwards. After his keynote, the regular pattern of great technical sessions continued.

After the last session of the day, Facebook.com sponsored a party down in the Exhibit Hall. It was a great party complete with a DJ and some kicking tunes.

As a side note, thanks to Aaron Wormus, I got to meet one of my all-time favorite fiction authors, Scott Sigler. I’ve been listening to his pod cast books for over a year now and have to say that Ancestor is one of the best fiction books I’ve ever read. Scott lives in the Bay Area and was just dropping by to visit with Aaron. It was one of my highlights of the conference to accidentally run into him. (and make a total idiot out of myself gushing over him like a fanboy.)

Wednesday

Wednesday broke bright and early for those of us who didn’t stay too late at the Facebook.com party. As with Tuesday, Wednesday started off with a keynote given by Anant Jhingran, VP & CTO, Information Management, IBM Software Group and
Mike Smith, Distinguished Engineer, i5/OS Architect at IBM. As with the other keynotes, it was a great talk and a great way to kick off the morning. The keynote was followed by a panel discussion moderated by Andi Gutmans. The topic of discussion was Case Studies. All panelists represented companies that have successfully deployed applications using PHP.

Since the Exhibit Hall was open again on Wednesday, there was a break so that everybody could make it down to visit the exhibits without missing the sessions. The afternoon sessions on Wednesday were up to the previous days high standards.

Wednesday’s second keynote was presented by David Berlind David works at ZDNet but is probably best known for his Mashup Camp. David discussed the “Mashup Economy” and showed us some cool ideas. One of the links he showed that I was surprised everybody didn’t know about was ProgrammableWeb.com. If you are interested in mashups, this is an invaluable resource.

As evening fell in god’s country, ZendCon attendees found another reception in the Exhibit Hall. This time OmniTI was buying the drinks and a great time was had by all. It was also the last chance to grab an eye-patch from IBM. (Read on, you’ll see it’s important)

The evening was dominated by IBM’s System i groups’ “Pirate Party”. (See, I told you it was important) It was a rousing success eve if the rain did force it inside. Oracle’s installfest both benefited and suffered from the party moving inside. Christopher and Alison did a great job of showing off Oracle’s wares and handing out T-Shirts but since the party was in the hall outside of their late evening session, they suffered from having some of the only seating at the party. This was not lost on them however as they took the opportunity and used it to talk to even more people about using Oracle with PHP.

Rumor has it that the #phpc “get together” blossomed into a full-blown party complete with Karaoke and ran way into the wee hours of Thursday. I was unable to attend (being the old man I am) so I don’t know the details first hand but there is enough picture evidence to suggest that a great time was had by all. (Including the two pirates who seemed to have followed the party off-site.)

Thursday

Thursday morning was beautiful for those of us who were awake to see it. Unlike previous conference days, Thursday started off with sessions . Since it was a short day there was only one keynote. Robert ‘r0ml’ Lefkowitz. R0ml talked about “The Semasiology of Open Source” which was part college lecture and part stand-up comedy routine. No matter which part you watched it was an informative and interesting keynote. without slighting the other keynotes (especially the two who are in my chain of command) it was probably my favorite.

Unfortunately, that was the end of ZendCon. People shook hands, exchanged email addresses and said goodbye till next year.

Looking back, I attended several really good sessions. there were some that I would have liked to attend but they were so packed that when I opened the door several people fell out. However, of the sessions I did attend, I would have to say the best one I saw was Wednesday afternoon’s “Amazon Web Services” by Jeffrey Barr of Amazon.com. Amazon has some great web services and while they pissed me off by starting to charge for Alexa’s thumbnail service, they still have some great services at reasonable prices. If you missed the session, you can check out their web page for details .

That’s it, no more. That’s a complete wrap-up of one of the most fun conferences I’ve been to this year. It was fun to see some of my old friends and great to make new ones.

Oh, I almost forgot, almost everyone by now has seen the PHP Community Playing Cards. I’d like to make sure that credit is given where credit is due. (because I got a lot of credit for that project and I had a LOT of help making it happen.) First, the idea came out of a conversation John Coggeshall and I had on IM one day. Second, I could not have gotten the project off the ground without the help of a wonderful lady, Jennifer Walsh. Third, the beautiful artwork was completed in a record time by the wonderful Revital. Finally, over one half of the pictures used came from Sebastian Bergmann’s flickr stream. I’d like to say a special thank you to Sebastian and to anyone else who contributed photos to make this project happen.

=C=

p.s. Here’s the conference Flickr stream for those who haven’t gotten your Flickr fix lately.