PHP Quebec - Day 1

Montreal is a beautiful city. PHPQuebec is a great conference. I could leave it at that and you would get the gist of today’s wrapup. However, let’s delve into a bit more detail.

First, a word about the hotel. PHPQuebec this year is at the Sofitel Montreal Hotel in downtown Montreal. I go to a lot of conferences each year but this is by far the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed at for a conference. it’s absolutely magnificent. I won’t go into details because if my boss ever realizes how much I enjoy going to these things, I’ll probably get re-assigned but we’ll leave it with…wow.

Don’t however, consider this conference just a vacation disguised as a conference. As nice as the hotel rooms are, you don’t get much of a chance to enjoy them during PHPQuebec. The sessions this year are very good and attendees are usually forced to make a hard choice as to which session to attend. The ones I found time to stick my head into were Derick Rethans’ Filtering talk and Chris Shiflett’s Session talk. Both great sessions packed with lots of code sample goodness. Look for the slides of these two sessions to be posted soon.

A new friend I made was Morgan Tocker. Morgan is a support tech for MySQL and he gave a talk titled “10 Random tips for MySQL performance Optimisation”. He did a great job and even though I’ve been working with MySQL for 7 years now, I still came away with a new trick or two.

However the best session I attended had to be Rob Richard’s “SOA: Beyond the Hype”. Rob started 5 minutes early and I swear he didn’t take a breath till he finished 60 minutes later. This session was jam packed and if you get the chance to see it, I highly recommend it. Rob does a great job of slicing through the marketing hype and dig into what SOA really is and what it means to us as developers. He even shows a little sample code near the end.

That’s all for today. I’ll do a complete conference wrap up over the weekend.

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