Business cards have been swapped, hand-shakes and back-slaps given and the crew from facebook.com is off to sponsor their next party. Let’s take a look back over our shoulder at what was php|tek ‘07 before packing for the next event.

Monday evening found many of us hanging out in the Red Bar, the watering hole for the recently renovated Hyatt Regency O’Hare. Davey Shafik brought cards and chips so a game of poker soon broke out. Those of us not directly involved in the game sat around and discussed tech, politics or just generally shot the bull getting to know each other. At this impromptu party, I first met Elizabeth Smith and Elizabeth Narimore, both representing phpwomen.org.

Tuesday

php|tek, like most PHP conferences these days, started with a day of tutorials. I floated in and out of several of them but the memorable one has to be Paul Reinheimmer’s Zend Certification Crash Couse. I fisrt saw Paul try and squeeze his 18 hour on-line course into 6 hours back at php|works in Toronto. This time he was a bit more practiced at it and did a great job. His course was so popular that we gave the Zend Certification exam to almost fifty percent of the attendees.

Wednesday

Wednesday’s opening keynote was by Rasmus Lerdorf, “PHP on Hormones”. It’s been my privilege to see this presentation several times now and each time I do, I pull something new out of it. Rasmus talks about how PHP grew to where it was, how to make it faster and how to make it more secure. It really is a great presentation and if you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, I highly recommend it. I think the thing that struck me this time more than anything was his section on section on security. His presentation on JavaScript Trojans is eye-opening.

The rest of the day was broken into sessions punctuated by coffee and lunch breaks. The food at php|tek was very good this year. Each day there was a different’ theme for the lunch mean and to my great surprise (being a basic meat and potatoes man myself) the last day we were treated to some very good hamburgers and hotdogs.

Wednesday evening was the PHP Trivia contest. Paul and Sean did a great job of putting on a show and everyone including the contestants had a great time. I will admit though that the crowd thinned out a bit when the open bar closed. Several people had the foresight to order three or four drinks at the outset so that the night didn’t slow down for them. The highlight of the night was of course Sara Golman’s “Octal Mistake” which I’m sure will go down in PHP lore.

Thursday

By Thursday the conference was in full swing. There was no opening keynote for the day, we just jumped right into sessions. When not fighting for Wi-Fi out in the main hall (“Speaker’s Row”) I was able to attend several really good sessions including Jay Pipes’ “Top 15 Ways to Kill MySQL Performance”. Jay does a super job at pointing out the problems that many of us create for ourselves when developing with MySQL.

Thursday evening’s event was a party sponsored by facebook.com. It was a great time for all who attended. I had the privilege of sitting with Elizabeth Smith as she interviewed Sara Goleman for an upcoming article on phpwomen.org. It’s always fascinating to find out the back story on the heavyweights in the PHP community. I can’t wait for the final article. After the party, several of us including Joanna, Elizabeth, Ed Finkler and Davey Shafik, sat in the bar just enjoying each other’s company.

Friday

Friday morning, came a little too early for those of us who were at the bar a little too late. Even so, Joe Stagner’s keynote was something no one wanted to miss. I always admire Joe’s courage, Microsoft hasn’t traditionally received a warm welcome in the open source community. Thanks to people like Joe, that attitude is slowly changing. Joe did a great job of presenting the case that Microsoft wants to be a serious contender for production deployment of PHP applications. He highlighted the work that Microsoft and Zend have done to make FastCGI and PHP perform better and showed how Microsoft is working to make sure that PHP is not left out when building things like the .NET Ajax framework and the new Silverlight.

Afterwards, Joe moved out into the hall and hung around talking to attendees answering questions, dodging slings and spears and generally doing a lot to show that Microsoft is serious about this effort. He also came bearing gifts. Recently Elizabeth Smith has blogged about her ongoing efforts to build PHP extensions on Windows. One of the problems she had was that she was missing a specific version of the C++ compiler for Windows. Joe came to her rescue and found a copy for her so that she and the community at large can benefit.

The final session of the day Friday was Marco’s closing keynote. As is the tradition, Marco presented a short, insightful, if a bit off-the-wall presentation titled “What do PHP and Mayo have in common.” I’ll leave it to Marco to blog the whole session but suffice to say it was entertaining.

Final Thoughts

As with any conference, there were some technical difficulties. Rasmus’ microphone seemed to be haunted as it kept making strange noises as he was talking. However the strangest thing had to be Mike Potter’s technical difficulties in his “Rich Internet Applications” talk on Tuesday. Mike was about 5 minutes into his presentation when he needed to switch from his presentation to an application. He pressed the keys but the only thing that happened was that his Mac froze. Unfazed, Mike turned the presentation over to Active Media Architects who talked briefly about mykleenextissue.com but then quickly segued into a demo of their new product, a Flex based chat application for those site who want to add chat as a customer service option. They did a great job of showcasing their products and what is possible when Flex is used with a PHP backend.

When they were done, Mike came back on the stage, sans Mac to explain that his Mac had chosen that very minute to blow a harddrive. However, being a veteran presenter, Mike powered on and finished the talk, sans slides.

All in all though, php|tek was a great conference, a wonderful social event and lived up to it’s reputation in every way. Marco, Sean, and Paul did a great job and I’m looking forward to next year. (You guys throw a great party!)

So once again, I pack my bags, don my battered fedora, and ride my trusty steed Southwest, off to the next event.